The WEAVE spectrograph on the WHT: plans for radial velocity and chemistry surveys of the northern and equatorial Milky Way

Abstract

WEAVE, the next-generation spectroscopic facility for the WHT, is being built with Gaia support as a central science case. WEAVE is a π-square degree multi-fibre system capable of deploying either 1000 single-fibre probes, 20 mini-IFUs or a single large IFU, to feed a two-arm bench spectrograph. With two spectral resolution modes, main products in support of Gaia will be 1–2 km s−1 accuracy radial velocities in the range 16 < V < 20, and abundances of individual elements to ∼0.1 dex up to V ∼ 17. WEAVE will be used to carry out massive surveys that exploit Gaia data in topics of Milky Way astronomy and stellar evolution.