(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pachon in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.

/pdf/lsst-from-science-drivers-to-reference-design-and-5mqdgndbq1.pdf

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

We present cosmological results from the final galaxy clustering data set of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our combined galaxy sample comprises 1.2 million massive galaxies over an effective area of 9329 deg^2 and volume of 18.7 Gpc^3, divided into three partially overlapping redshift slices centred at effective redshifts 0.38, 0.51 and 0.61. We measure the angular diameter distance and Hubble parameter H from the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) method, in combination with a cosmic microwave background prior on the sound horizon scale, after applying reconstruction to reduce non-linear effects on the BAO feature. Using the anisotropic clustering of the pre-reconstruction density field, we measure the product D_MH from the Alcock–Paczynski (AP) effect and the growth of structure, quantified by fσ_8(z), from redshift-space distortions (RSD). We combine individual measurements presented in seven companion papers into a set of consensus values and likelihoods, obtaining constraints that are tighter and more robust than those from any one method; in particular, the AP measurement from sub-BAO scales sharpens constraints from post-reconstruction BAOs by breaking degeneracy between D_M and H. Combined with Planck 2016 cosmic microwave background measurements, our distance scale measurements simultaneously imply curvature Ω_K = 0.0003 ± 0.0026 and a dark energy equation-of-state parameter w = −1.01 ± 0.06, in strong affirmation of the spatially flat cold dark matter (CDM) model with a cosmological constant (ΛCDM). Our RSD measurements of fσ_8, at 6 per cent precision, are similarly consistent with this model. When combined with supernova Ia data, we find H_0 = 67.3 ± 1.0 km s^−1 Mpc^−1 even for our most general dark energy model, in tension with some direct measurements. Adding extra relativistic species as a degree of freedom loosens the constraint only slightly, to H_0 = 67.8 ± 1.2 km s^−1 Mpc^−1. Assuming flat ΛCDM, we find Ω_m = 0.310 ± 0.005 and H_0 = 67.6 ± 0.5 km s^−1 Mpc^−1, and we find a 95 per cent upper limit of 0.16 eV c^−2 on the neutrino mass sum.

/pdf/the-clustering-of-galaxies-in-the-completed-sdss-iii-baryon-9u22inggxj.pdf

The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly elliptical 13.7-day orbit around the Earth. During its 2-year mission, TESS will employ four wide-field optical charge-coupled device cameras to monitor at least 200,000 main-sequence dwarf stars with I C ≈4−13 for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Each star will be observed for an interval ranging from 1 month to 1 year, depending mainly on the star’s ecliptic latitude. The longest observing intervals will be for stars near the ecliptic poles, which are the optimal locations for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. Brightness measurements of preselected target stars will be recorded every 2 min, and full frame images will be recorded every 30 min. TESS stars will be 10 to 100 times brighter than those surveyed by the pioneering Kepler mission. This will make TESS planets easier to characterize with follow-up observations. TESS is expected to find more than a thousand planets smaller than Neptune, including dozens that are comparable in size to the Earth. Public data releases will occur every 4 months, inviting immediate community-wide efforts to study the new planets. The TESS legacy will be a catalog of the nearest and brightest stars hosting transiting planets, which will endure as highly favorable targets for detailed investigations.

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/Journal-of-Astronomical-Telescopes-Instruments-and-Systems/volume-1/issue-1/014003/Transiting-Exoplanet-Survey-Satellite/10.1117/1.JATIS.1.1.014003.pdf

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

We substantially update the capabilities of the open-source software instrument Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). MESA can now simultaneously evolve an interacting pair of differentially rotating stars undergoing transfer and loss of mass and angular momentum, greatly enhancing the prior ability to model binary evolution. New MESA capabilities in fully coupled calculation of nuclear networks with hundreds of isotopes now allow MESA to accurately simulate advanced burning stages needed to construct supernova progenitor models. Implicit hydrodynamics with shocks can now be treated with MESA, enabling modeling of the entire massive star lifecycle, from pre-main sequence evolution to the onset of core collapse and nucleosynthesis from the resulting explosion. Coupling of the GYRE non-adiabatic pulsation instrument with MESA allows for new explorations of the instability strips for massive stars while also accelerating the astrophysical use of asteroseismology data. We improve treatment of mass accretion, giving more accurate and robust near-surface profiles. A new MESA capability to calculate weak reaction rates "on-the-fly" from input nuclear data allows better simulation of accretion induced collapse of massive white dwarfs and the fate of some massive stars. We discuss the ongoing challenge of chemical diffusion in the strongly coupled plasma regime, and exhibit improvements in MESA that now allow for the simulation of radiative levitation of heavy elements in hot stars. We close by noting that the MESA software infrastructure provides bit-for-bit consistency for all results across all the supported platforms, a profound enabling capability for accelerating MESA's development.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0067-0049/220/1/15/pdf

Modules for experiments in stellar astrophysics (mesa): binaries, pulsations, and explosions

Astronomical data analysis software and systems

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has the potential to measure parallaxes for thousands of nearby ultracool dwarfs, enabling improved measurements of the brown dwarf luminosity function. We develop a simple model to estimate the number of L dwarfs and T dwarfs with parallaxes with signal-to-noise ratio greater than 10 in the baseline LSST survey. High-quality astrometry imposes scheduling constraints. We assess different possible observing strategies using quantitative metrics and make recommendations as part of the LSST community input process. We find that the new substellar parallax sample will represent a nearly order-of-magnitude increase on existing samples, with ∼50–100 objects per spectral type bin for late-L to mid-T dwarfs. The sample size is robust (±5% or less) against most survey strategy changes under consideration, although we do identify areas of tension with other uses of twilight time that could have a larger impact.

LSST Survey Strategies and Brown Dwarf Parallaxes

The 8.4 m Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will provide an unprecedented view of the Solar System (Ivezic et al. 2008; LSST Science Collaboration et al. 2009). LSST will detect millions of as ...

A Software Roadmap for Solar System Science with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

We report on a study to determine the efficiency of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to recover the periods, brightnesses, and shapes of RR Lyrae stars' light curves in the volume extending to heliocentric distances of 1.5 Mpc. We place the smoothed light curves of 30 type ab and 10 type c RR Lyrae stars in 1007 fields across the sky, each of which represents a different realization of the LSST sampling cadences, and that sample five particular observing modes. A light curve simulation tool was used to sample the idealized RR Lyrae stars' light curves, returning each as it would have been observed by LSST, including realistic photometric scatter, limiting magnitudes, and telescope downtime. We report here the period, brightness, and light curve shape recovery as a function of apparent magnitude and for survey lengths varying from 1 to 10 years. We find that 10 years of LSST data are sufficient to recover the pulsation periods with a fractional precision of ~10^(–5) for ≥90% of ab stars within ≈360 kpc of the Sun in Universal Cadence fields and out to ≈760 kpc for Deep Drilling fields. The 50% completeness level extends to ≈600 kpc and ≈1.0 Mpc for the same fields, respectively. For virtually all stars that had their periods recovered, their light curve shape parameter φ_31 was recovered with sufficient precision to also recover photometric metallicities to within 0.14 dex (the systematic error in the photometric relations). With RR Lyrae stars' periods and metallicities well measured to these distances, LSST will be able to search for halo streams and dwarf satellite galaxies over half of the Local Group, informing galaxy formation models and providing essential data for mapping the Galactic potential. This study also informs the LSST science operations plan for optimizing observing strategies to achieve particular science goals. We additionally present a new [Fe/H]-φ_31 photometric relation in the r band and a new and generally useful metric for defining period recovery for time domain surveys.

/pdf/simulated-lsst-survey-of-rr-lyrae-stars-throughout-the-local-2ay0c8pkvm.pdf

Simulated lsst survey of rr lyrae stars throughout the local group

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LSST Survey Strategies and Brown Dwarf Parallaxes

A Software Roadmap for Solar System Science with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Simulated lsst survey of rr lyrae stars throughout the local group