The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey is a project to exploit the latest generation of ground-based wide-field survey facilities to study cosmology and galaxy formation and evolution. GAMA will bring together data from a number of world class instruments: * The

Anglo-Australian Telescope The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) is a 3.9-metre equatorially mounted telescope operated by the Australian Astronomical Observatory and situated at the Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, at an altitude of a little over 1,100 m. In 2 ...

(AAT), * The

VLT Survey Telescope The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is a telescope located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It is housed in an enclosure immediately adjacent to the four Very Large Telescope (VLT) Unit Telescopes on the summit ...

(VST) * The

Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy The VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is a wide-field reflecting telescope with a 4.1 metre mirror, located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. It is operated by the European Southern Observatory and started science op ...

(VISTA) * The

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Mid West region of Western Australia. The facility began as a technology demonstrator for the in ...

(ASKAP) * The

Herschel Space Observatory The Herschel Space Observatory was a space observatory built and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was active from 2009 to 2013, and was the largest infrared telescope ever launched until the launch of the James Webb Space Telesc ...

* The

Galaxy Evolution Explorer Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX or Explorer 83 or SMEX-7) was a NASA orbiting space telescope designed to observe the universe in ultraviolet wavelengths to measure the history of star formation in the universe. In addition to paving the way ...

(GALEX) Data from these instruments will be used to construct a state-of-the-art multi-wavelength database of ~375,000 galaxies in the local Universe over a 360 deg2 region of sky, based on a spectroscopic redshift survey on the AAT's AAOmega spectrograph. The main objective of GAMA is to study structure on scales of 1 kpc to 1 Mpc. This includes galaxy clusters, groups, mergers and coarse measurements of galaxy structure (i.e., bulges and discs). It is on these scales where baryons play a critical role in the galaxy formation and subsequent evolutionary processes and where our understanding of structure in the Universe breaks down. GAMA's primary goal is to test the CDM paradigm of structure formation. In particular, the key scientific objectives are: * A measurement of the dark matter halo mass function of groups and clusters using group velocity dispersion measurements. * A comprehensive determination of the galaxy stellar mass function to Magellanic Cloud masses to constrain baryonic feedback processes. * A direct measurement of the recent galaxy merger rates as a function of mass, mass ratio, local environment and galaxy type. In August 2012 GAMA received worldwide attention for its announcement of a galaxy system very similar to our own Milky-Way Magellanic Cloud system, centred on GAMA202627.

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