The Calar Alto Observatory remains at the forefront of Astronomy thanks to its firm commitment to technological renovation, which resulted in 2018 in the call for the development of new instrumentation. The advisory committee of the Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán (CAHA) has selected LUCA - The Local Universe from Calar Alto - as the new generation instrumentation development and science program for the observatory. LUCA will play a key role to strengthen the world-leading role of the observatory in its new phase starting in January 2019 once the Junta de Andalucía joins at 50% funding level to the scientific facility. Thus, the Junta de Andalucía will be part of the Astronomical Observatory of Calar Alto, replacing the German Max-Planck Society. To this end, together with the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) the continuity and operations of the observatory will be ensured. With this new agreement the links of the scientific community in Andalucía will be reinforced, fostering new forms of collaboration that will take advantage in the access to this first class scientific facility and participate in the development of state-of-the-art instrumentation. In this regard, LUCA offers a unique opportunity to establish networks of scientific and technological spaces between the I+D+i system and innovative companies in Andalucía to enhance the transfer of knowledge to our productive sector and society. LUCA is an ambitious instrumentation and science program that aims to unravel physical processes at small enough scale to study how star formation, feedback and other key processes affect the formation and evolution of galaxies in our Local Universe. LUCA will take advantage of the new generation of instruments being developed for the 3.5 m and the Schmidt 80 cm telescopes at Calar Alto.

The feasibility study phase for IFU-6000, the new Integral Field Unit (IFU) fiber-fed spectrograph at the 3.5 m telescope has already started on 15 October 2018, funded by the Junta de Andalucía and managed by the University of Almería (UAL) with 100k euros. The project was conceived at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) who leads an international collaboration in close partnership with the Calar Alto Observatory (CAHA), the Universidad de Almería (UAL), the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM), the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO), and the Center for Astronomical Instrumentation at Durham University (CfAI). The project has also the goal to engage interested innovative companies and other astronomy and engineering university departments in a tight collaboration towards new opportunities for technology transfer and training and research programs. This new instrument plans to start its operations in 2022 and will be dedicated within the LUCA science program to study the sub-grid physics of hundreds of galaxies in our Local Universe. The construction plan of IFU-6000 will follow similar phases, management and funding route as that of the previously successful spectrograph CARMENES. Yet, in order to complete the LUCA science program we have to build another fiber-fed spectrograph IFU-850 at the Schmidt 80 cm telescope, which plays a twofold major role: (1) the technical features of the Schmidt telescope provide the adequate fiber scale and time availability to become an efficient facility to observe the most important galaxies included in the LUCA sample, i.e., Andromeda (M31) and the Triangulum (M33) galaxies, which due to their huge angular size on the sky would otherwise consume most of the available time at the 3.5 m telescope; (2) we also foresee a cosmic flow galaxy survey of the Local Volume which will be fundamental to map the 3D large-scale structure, and hence determine the matter density distribution of our Local Universe. This will be key to explain how the LUCA galaxies form and how they evolve depending on their environment. IFU-850 at the Schmidt telescope is the cornerstone of the LUCA project and represents the central instrumentation and science activities described in this funding proposal. IFU-850 will be a single spectrograph that will have two observing modes: an IFU with 6’x6’ and 850 fibers each of 8.6” and a Multi-Object (MOS) mode with 200 robot fiber positioners over a field of view of 50 sq. deg. IFU-850 is already in its construction phase. Therefore, IFU-850 at the Schmidt telescope will be an accelerator for the earlier success of LUCA that will allow us to start the observations in autumn 2020 and will guarantee to have first science results over the following two years. Thus, we aim here for a 6-year project, which will clearly benefit the Calar Alto observatory and our astronomical community in terms of competitiveness and leadership in modern astrophysics.

The large-scale structure of the universe is a complex web of clusters, filaments, and voids. Cosmology has been successful to explain the large-scale structures of galaxies via hierarchical clustering. However, at small and intermediate scales, there are a significant number of problems to explain how galaxies form and how they evolve depending on their environment. Recently, high spatial resolution cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and evolution have started to be developed. These models require the implementation of accurate phenomenological prescriptions for the sub-grid physics governing galaxy evolution, in particular those that link the star formation processes with the galactic feedback, which occur on ~few ten pc scales. Galaxies are a complex mix of baryonic (stars, gas, and dust) and dark matter and radiation, spatially distributed in different components (bulge, thin and thick disk, halo) at kpc scales. However, the physical processes that lead to star formation and the modes by which this activity couples to the broader environment where galaxies flow occur on smaller scales, of a few tens of parsecs. The LUCA program proposes to study the Local Universe from these small parsec scales to the scales of the nearest galaxy cluster. This will improve by more than an order of magnitude the spatial resolution of current IFU galaxy surveys (e.g., CALIFA, MaNGA). As defined by the IAU, based on current resolution of individual stars, the Local Universe comprises a sphere of radius 15 Mpc centred in the Local Group, and it includes the Local Volume and the Virgo cluster. Galaxies in the Local Universe offer us the unique opportunity to map the kinematics, physical and chemical properties of the stellar populations, the interstellar medium, and dark matter at spatial scales from a few pc, as in M31 or M33, to less than 100pc in the Virgo cluster. This is the range of spatial scales needed to constrain the sub-grid physics in models of galaxy formation and evolution. Some of the nearest galaxies, such as M31 and M33, have huge angular sizes (3 deg and 1.2 deg angular diameter) that far exceed the mean size 5' of the main LUCA sample. If attempted to be fully mapped with the proposed instrumental configuration at the 3.5 m, they would absorb an unreasonable amount of observing time. However, these galaxies are pivotal in our understanding of the structure and evolution of galaxies, as shown by the exhaustive literature published over a century. M31 and M33, together with the Milky Way, are the main players in the Local Group, and they also provide the highest spatial resolution, 4 pc/arcsec of the LUCA galaxy sample. The technical features of the Schmidt telescope provide the adequate requirements, as mentioned above, and time availability to make it an efficient facility to perform an IFU map of those two galaxies together with a MOS cosmic flow galaxy survey of the surrounding large-scale structure of our Local Volume. This will be possible thanks to the new IFU-850 spectrograph currently being built by our group.

Furthermore, because over this local volume all the galaxies are considered to be at roughly the same cosmic epoch, but the local density field varies by a factor of ~100, the large-scale evolutionary effects are due more to the underlying density than to any variation in epoch. Thus, LUCA will enable us to map the bulge, disk, and halo properties with unprecedented high spatial resolution, and to study the effects of the environment on these galaxy components at different levels of field density, isolated galaxies, galaxy groups, and the nearest galaxy cluster. In this context we aim to perform a MOS peculiar velocity galaxy survey named LoRCA (The Low Redshift survey at Calar Alto) to map the matter distribution, velocity flows and environment that surround our Local Volume on larger scales (< 400 Mpc).

More details on the science program and mapping strategy will follow.