The Infra-Red Follow-Up of the Next Generation Virgo Survey (NGVS-IR): Survey Status and First Results (Roberto Muñoz, DAA-PUC)

The Next Generation Virgo Survey (NGVS) is a multiwavelength imaging survey of the Virgo cluster, that was designed to provide deep, high spatial resolution and contiguous coverage of Virgo from its core to virial radius. It mainly consists of optical ground-based imaging of the central 104 deg² (CFHT/MEGACAM), near-UV space imaging of the central 120 deg² (GALEX) and near-IR ground based imaging of the central 4 deg² (CFHT/WIRCAM). The main scientific goals of the NGVS survey are to study the globular cluster populations of Virgo, the low-mass end of the stellar mass function of Virgo galaxies, the characterization of high-z galaxy clusters in the Virgo area, and the discovery of Kuiper Belt objects.

In this talk, I will first introduce the near-IR follow-up of the NGVS survey (NGVS-IR) and then show some preliminary results. The NGVS-IR survey was carried out with the WIRCAM instrument at the CFHT telescope, and consists of K-band imaging of the central 4 deg² of Virgo cluster. The aims of the survey are to study the age and metallicity distributions of M87 globular clusters, the K-band luminosity function of Virgo cluster galaxies, and the identification of 0.8 < z < 1.4 galaxy clusters in the Virgo area. A comparison against the 2MASS, UKIDSS and HeViCS datasets covering the same area, reveals the unique characteristics of the NGVS-IR survey and places it like the best-ever done near-IR survey of Virgo cluster. I will present several galaxy clusters at z > 0.8 that have been recently discovered in the NGVS-IR survey by using the cluster-red-sequence method, and will discuss on-going plans for studying the low-mass end of the stellar mass function of galaxies in Virgo.