Two LSST white paper are led by INAF-OAPA astronomers
LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) is the future of the astronomy in the time domain. LSST is a new-generation telescope that will be built on Cerro Pachon in Chile (2700 meters). It will be equipped with a primary mirror of 8.4 meters of diameter and an innovative camera able to observe an very large field of view, more than 49 times the size of the full Moon. This will allow LSST to observe the entire sky in just three nights.
LSST will conduct an unprecedented survey, observing several times the entire sky for 10 years. It has been estimated that LSST will produce more than 5 millions exposures in several optical bands over an area of 30000 square degrees in the sky. This will allow studies of variability in multi-band of a large variety of astronomical sources, from stars in the Milky Way to the outer galaxies. LSST observations will thus be a milestone for several fields of astronomy: cosmology, the study of the Solar System, transient objects in the Milky Way, the structure of our Galaxy, etc…
The begin of the operations is scheduled for 2022. In the meanwhile, the astronomers involved in LSST have planned the scientific projects that will form the survey. These projects are called “white papers”, will be used to finalize the observing strategy of LSST. Two white papers are led by astronomers of INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Palermo.
The project: “Investigating the population of Galactic star formation regions and star clusters within a Wide-Fast-Deep Coverage of the Galactic Plane“, led by Loredana Prisinzano together with Laura Magrini (INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Firenze), aims at finding and analyze new stellar clusters in the Milky Way. The repeated observations of LSST, in fact, will reach an unmatched depth in the optical bands. This means that they will observe faint stars never observed before, because of their large distance or the large extinction of their radiation due to the dusts in the Milky Way. This project will thus map the distribution of the clusters of our Galaxy and study their properties with a completeness that has never been achieved before.
The project “Young Stars and their Variability with LSST“, led da Rosaria Bonito together with Patrick Hartigan (Physics and Astronomy Dept., Rice University) and Eric Feigelson (Pennsylvania State University), is instead focused of the variability of pre-main sequence stars, and in particular of stars with protoplanetary disks. These disks are the structures in which planets form, and they orbit around their stars for a few million years. The study of the variability of young stars is thus important to understand the early evolution of stars and the formation of planetary systems. LSST will allow for the first time to monitor the variability of a large amount of young pre-main sequence stars spread over the Milky Way for a 10 years long baseline, unveiling most of their secrets.
The figure (link) shows a 3D rendering of LSST.
by Mario Giuseppe Guarcello ( follow mguarce)