Transform our Understanding of the Baryon Cycle with High-Resolution Quasar Spectroscopy (ByCycle)
The term baryons refers to the normal matter of the Universe. Surprisingly, only a minority of this normal matter (<10%) can be probed by observations of starlight from galaxies. The ByCycle project aims at studying the remaining majority of the baryons traced by the intergalactic gas. To this end, ByCycle will use the 4MOST 2500-fibre instrument on the 4-m class VISTA telescope in Paranal (Chile) and the powerful synergy of absorption and emission diagnostics by observing a large sample of background quasars to probe the circumgalactic medium of foreground objects in the same sky regions. The objective of the 2.8-million fibre-hour ByCycle project is to ultimately characterise the physical processes by of gas flows in and out of galaxies. Such a study is essential to our understanding of the growth of structure in the Universe.
Meet the team
Publications list