LSST E-News

Building Community, Building LSST

LSST was designed from the outset both to engage and serve a broad community. Simulations have shown that a single data set can address scientific problems in areas of astronomy ranging from studies of small bodies in the solar system to uncovering the properties of dark matter and dark energy. All data obtained will be available with no proprietary period. Hundreds of people are currently contributing to the design and development phase of the project.

As we go to press with this 10^th quarterly issue of LSST E-News, the LSST Project Office is hard at work planning events to bring this broad community together. Read More…

LSST on Cerro Pachón – Innovative, Sleek Building Design

The design of the LSST summit support facility is progressing, and now features an innovative, sleek building design to complement the stunning views. Since May of 2006 we’ve known that LSST will be sited on Cerro Pachón, an 8,700-foot (2,650-meter) mountain peak in northern Chile, one kilometer west of the Gemini South and SOAR telescopes. Now ARCADIS Geotécnica, a Chilean firm contracted for the architecture and engineering of the LSST summit support facility, is working on the final design for the facility and showing us what LSST could look like at that location. The exterior building form in this concept developed by ARCADIS and their architectural subcontractor, Guillermo Hevia & Associates, is shaped by topography and aerodynamics. Read More…

Characterizing Stellar Populations to Solve Puzzles about the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies

What do we know about the 3 septillion or so stars in the Universe? Although centuries of observations have revealed much about the stars that populate our Galaxy, many mysteries about individual populations remain. A population is a group of stars that shares consistent spatial, kinematic, chemical or age characteristics. Characterizing and mapping these populations provide powerful probes of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena and address fundamental scientific questions that extend more broadly than the details of a particular group: How do the properties of the individual stars within these populations inform our understanding of stellar evolution? What do the characteristics these populations have in common, i.e., that make them populations, tell us about the early history and evolution of the Universe? Read More…

Kevin Covey – Mapping a Path to Stellar Science

Astronomer Kevin Covey co-chairs the LSST Stellar Populations Science Collaboration Team, but he could easily have a second career as a cartographer. From mapping out the formation and evolution of low-mass stars, to establishing the path to stellar science with the LSST, to providing his students with the bearings they need to blaze their own trails, Kevin works hard to identify the right path from point A to point B.

Kevin, now a Hubble Fellow at Cornell University, spends his days (and nights) studying the formation and evolution of low-mass stars. A central focus of his research is to understand how a star’s angular momentum changes over time. Kevin studies how the youngest stars exchange mass and angular momentum with their circumstellar disks and how those interactions might influence planet formation within the disks. He also tracks how stellar rotation evolves following the dissipation of circumstellar disks, helping calibrate a “rotational clock” to estimate the ages of individual stars in the Milky Way. Read More…

Transient Events iPhone App

The Universe? There’s an App for that. V1.04 of the LSST Transient Events iPhone App was released in mid-July, delivering alerts of selected celestial events directly to subscribers’ phones. As a pre-cursor to alerts issued by LSST during operations, astronomers and citizen scientists can use the App to learn about objects of interest and plan follow-up observations. Read More…