LSST E-News |
Project Office Update
Snow on Cerro Pachón
Major steps forward have taken place this quarter, including the scheduling by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the LSST Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the week of August 29th in Tucson. The NSF PDR is a major assessment point on the path to receiving construction funding from NSF. This week-long review of the project will assess the robustness of the technical design and completeness of the budget and construction planning. Read more...
AstroViz 2011: Do I need my (3D) glasses for this?
Participants in the AstroViz 2011 Workshop.
Astronomy Visualization, AstroViz, was the topic of a workshop held at The University of Washington (UW) in early June. AstroViz workshops have been taking place since 2005, bringing together individuals with a broad range of backgrounds, interests and expertise to discuss the development of visualization for use in both research and education. Read More…
Searching for Dwarf Galaxies and Big Waves – Marla Geha
Marla Geha
Marla Geha is the co-chair of the Milky Way and Local Volume Structure science collaboration with Beth Willman. This collaboration’s primary science goals are to map the main components of the Milky Way, to find small dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, and to trace out any lumpiness or substructure in the Milky Way that can provide evidence of dwarf galaxy satellites destroyed by its gravity. Accomplishing these goals will require data across the full sky.
“LSST’s camera has a large field of view and by stitching together many of these images, we hope to reconstruct the Galaxy in which we live.” Read More…
LSST Key Player in Sea Change of Data Availability
LSST continues to be recognized as a leader in the new astronomical research paradigm of Data Intensive Astronomy by pushing the envelope on all aspects: data mining, data sharing, and cyberinfrastructure. LSST’s contributions to the advancement of computational systems, the fostering of the next generation of cross-disciplinary scientists, and investments in the developing world’s cyber-infrastructure contribute to narrowing the gap between awareness of increasingly massive data collections and understanding of the knowledge within them. Read More…
Strong Gravitational Lensing – LSST Investigates Cosmology, Distant Galaxies and Dark Matter
Strong gravitational lensing bends light from a distant source to create distorted or multiple images. Credit: Tony Tyson, Greg Kochanski and Ian Dell’Antonio; Frank O’Connell and Jim McManus, adopted from The New York Times
A simple recipe: Take a lot of mass – a galaxy or cluster of galaxies – and place it in the line of sight to a distant object to create a powerful tool for studying cosmology and galaxy structure. This technique, gravitational lensing, provides information not only about the magnified source but also about the foreground lens. LSST will contain more strong gravitational lensing events – those where multiple images of the background source form – than any other survey before it, opening up a wealth of possibilities to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the Universe. The survey’s large volume, high accuracy photometry and multi-filter time series will produce some big advances in strong lensing science. Read More…
LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:
Adler Planetarium; Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL); California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Chile; Cornell University; Drexel University; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; George Mason University; Google, Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Institut de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3); Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) – Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Rutgers University; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Space Telescope Science Institute; Texas A & M University; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California at Davis; University of California at Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Michigan; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt University
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- Additional contributors as noted
LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.
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