Friday 17 February 2012 

Speaker: Professor Ian Shipsey (Purdue University)

Title: "The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope"

Abstract:
Recent technological advances have made it possible to carry out deep optical 
surveys of a large fraction of the visible sky. Such surveys enable a diverse 
array of astronomical investigations including: the search for small moving objects 
in the solar system, studies of the assembly history of the Milky Way, the 
establishment of tight constraints on models of dark energy using a variety of 
independent techniques and the exploration of the transient sky. The Large Synoptic 
Survey Telescope (LSST) is the most ambitious project of this kind that has yet 
been proposed. With an 8.4 m primary mirror, and a 3.2 Gigapixel, 10 square degree 
CCD camera, LSST will provide nearly an order of magnitude improvement in survey 
speed over all existing surveys, or those which are currently in development. 
In its first month of operation LSST will survey more of the universe than all 
previous telescopes built by mankind. Over the full ten years of operation, 
LSST will survey 20,000 square degrees of the sky in six optical colors down 
to 27th magnitude. Four billion new galaxies and 10 million supernovae will be 
discovered. At least a thousand distinct images will be acquired of every field, 
enabling a plethora of statistical investigations for intrinsic variability and 
for control of systematic uncertainties in deep imaging studies.  In this talk 
some of the science that will be made possible by the construction of LSST, 
especially dark energy science, and an overview of the technical design and 
current status of the project will be given.