Event Details

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will carry out an imaging survey covering the sky that is visible from Cerro Pachon in Northern Chile. With about 1000 observations of half the sky in ugrizy bands over a 10-year period, the LSST data will enable faint time-domain astronomy and a deep stack across half the sky reaching hundred times fainter flux limit than the SDSS survey. The resulting hundreds of petabytes of imaging data for close to 40 billion objects will be used for scientific investigations ranging from the properties of near-Earth asteroids and brown dwarfs, to characterizations of dark matter and energy from strong and weak lensing, galaxy clustering, and distant supernovae. These data will represent a treasure trove for follow-up programs using other ground and space-based telescopes, such as fast-response fast-cadence photometric observations and spectroscopy, as well as for facilities operating at nonoptical wavelengths and for gravitational wave programs. Dr. Ivezic will summarize the main LSST science drivers, and will illustrate them using ongoing work based on SDSS and other data. In particular, he will discuss in more detail recent work by his group on evidence for dark matter in the Milky Way halo from stellar kinematics, and the variability of quasars as a tool for their discovery and for studying their physics.

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