HELP: The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project

The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP) brings together a vast range of data frommany astronomical observatories. The key focus of the project is the Herschel Space Observatory data, which maps dust-obscured star formation over 1300 deg². With this unprecedented combination of data sets, itis possible to investigate the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time, and how the star formation versus stellar mass relation (main sequence)of star-forming galaxies depends on the environment and many other aspects of galaxy evolution.  HELP collates and homogenizes observations (λ from the radio to the UV) from many astronomical observatories, and moreover, estimates key physical parameters of observed galaxies.

The main goal of HELP is to remove the barriers to multi-λ statistical survey science and to produce value-added resources for astronomers to easily interpret the high redshift Universe. Understanding the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time is one of the great challenges of astrophysics. At the present day, galaxies found in different environments are very different from each other. To understand how this came to be we need to map a wide range of environments in the early Universe using telescopes that probe the different physical processes. Many astronomical facilities have thus been undertaking ambitious programmes to observe large areas of the distant Universe to study galaxy evolution and most of these complete in the next four years. HELP brings together key members of the various teams to combine these data homogenously.

Pi of the project: S. Oliver (Sussex University, UK)

Acknowledgements:

The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project, (HELP), is a European Commission Research Executive Agency funded project under the SP1-Cooperation, Collaborative project, Small or medium-scale focused research project, FP7-SPACE-2013-1 scheme, Grant Agreement Number 607254.
„ASTROdust: a complete census of dust attenuation in galaxies based on the analysis of millions of galaxies observed by Herschel” is the project SONATA BIS 2018/30/E/ST9/00082 (founded by National Science Centre, Poland).