EMPOWER is an ESO Public Survey awarded approximately 150 nights with VLT/KMOS. The EMPOWER IFU campaign will observe around 900 galaxies across three key cosmic epochs—z ≃ 0.75, z ≃ 1.6, and z ≃ 2.3—capturing the decline, peak, and early rise of the cosmic star formation rate density. By mapping emission-line properties across these epochs, EMPOWER will provide a unique, panoramic view of how galaxies evolve within the cosmic web.
EMPOWER will sample the full galaxy evolution parameter space, including stellar mass, star formation rate, nuclear activity, and position within the Cosmic Web.
By targeting galaxies in a wide rage of environments, from isolated galaxies and galaxy groups to clusters and protoclusters, EMPOWER will deliver deep spatially resolved maps of dust-corrected star formation rate, metallicity, and ionised gas kinematics.
EMPOWER will provide the essential high-redshift counterpart to local surveys (as MAGPI, CALIFA, SAMI, and MaNGA) and will act as the IFU counterpart to key upcoming environmental unresolved spectroscopic surveys (as 4MOST/WAVES, MOONS/MOONRISEm and Euclid) and photometric surveys (as COSMOS-Web) .
EMPOWER will deliver data in three independent sub-surveys, each per redshift range.
Redshift distribution of IFU (in black) and existing and upcoming spectroscopic surveys (in color). The EMPOWER redshift slices are indicated by the orange regions. The solid orange line indicates the evolution of the Cosmic star-formation rate density.
Evolution of the halo mass corresponding to the turn-over stellar mass
of the main sequence (orange shaded region) (Daddi et al., 2022,
Popesso et al., 2023) and the threshold mass between cold and
hot accretion . All three EMPOWER epochs are indicated.