Overview:

This Large Project at the VLA aims to understand the triggering mechanisms for star formation and the feedback from massive stars into the interstellar medium (ISM). Our team has been allocated 476 hours of VLA time to obtain high resolution (~6”) maps of 36 nearby galaxies in the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. The VLA survey is complementary to the ANGST project (ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury, PI: J. Dalcanton) currently underway at the Hubble Space Telescope (HST, ~300 orbits allocated).  A main, ambitious goal of ANGST is to derive maps of the star formation histories of all nearby galaxies up to a distance of 4 Mpc but excluding the Local Group. With the VLA in B, C, and D array configuration we will be able to match the resolution of these maps in order to study the interaction between the stars and gas in the nearby Universe.