Published in The Messenger vol. 170, (pp. 29-33), p. December 2017., 2017
The MUSE spectrograph is observing a sample of over 100 galaxies at z = 0.04–0.07 in order to investigate how environmental effects can cause galaxies to lose their gas. These galaxies have a wide range of galaxy stellar masses and environments, from clusters and groups to isolated galaxies, and have been selected because they show unilateral debris or tails suggestive of gas stripping. MUSE’s large field of view, sensitivity, and spatial and spectral resolution allow us to study the physics of the stars and ionised gas in each galaxy in great detail, including the outskirts and extraplanar tails or debris out to 50–100 kpc away from each galaxy: a distance of more than ten times the galaxy’s effective radius. We present the ongoing programme, GAs Stripping Phenomena in galaxies (GASP), and report on the first set of results.