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LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

LSST Science Collaboration, Paul A. Abell, Julius Allison, Scott F. Anderson, John R. Andrew, J. Roger P. Angel, Lee Armus, David Arnett, S. J. Asztalos, Tim S. Axelrod, Stephen Bailey, D. R. Ballantyne, Justin R. Bankert, Wayne A. Barkhouse, Jeffrey D. Barr, L. Felipe Barrientos, Aaron J. Barth, James G. Bartlett, Andrew C. Becker, Jacek Becla, Timothy C. Beers, Joseph P. Bernstein, Rahul Biswas, Michael R. Blanton, Joshua S. Bloom, John J. Bochanski, Pat Boeshaar, Kirk D. Borne, Marusa Bradac, W. N. Brandt, Carrie R. Bridge, Michael E. Brown, Robert J. Brunner, James S. Bullock, Adam J. Burgasser, James H. Burge, David L. Burke, Phillip A. Cargile, Srinivasan Chandrasekharan, George Chartas, Steven R. Chesley, You-Hua Chu, David Cinabro, Mark W. Claire, Charles F. Claver, Douglas Clowe, A. J. Connolly, Kem H. Cook, Jeff Cooke, Asantha Cooray, Kevin R. Covey, Christopher S. Culliton, Roelof de Jong, Willem H. de Vries, Victor P. Debattista, Francisco Delgado, Ian P. Dell'Antonio, Saurav Dhital, Rosanne Di Stefano, Mark Dickinson, Benjamin Dilday, S. G. Djorgovski, Gregory Dobler, Ciro Donalek, Gregory Dubois-Felsmann, Josef Durech, Ardis Eliasdottir, Michael Eracleous, Laurent Eyer, Emilio E. Falco, Xiaohui Fan, Christopher D. Fassnacht, Harry C. Ferguson, Yanga R. Fernandez, Brian D. Fields, Douglas Finkbeiner, Eduardo E. Figueroa, Derek B. Fox, Harold Francke, James S. Frank, Josh Frieman, Sebastien Fromenteau, Muhammad Furqan, Gaspar Galaz, A. Gal-Yam, Peter Garnavich, Eric Gawiser, John Geary, Perry Gee, Robert R. Gibson, Kirk Gilmore, Emily A. Grace, Richard F. Green, William J. Gressler, Carl J. Grillmair, Salman Habib, J. S. Haggerty, Mario Hamuy, Alan W. Harris, Suzanne L. Hawley, Alan F. Heavens, Leslie Hebb, Todd J. Henry, Edward Hileman, Eric J. Hilton, Keri Hoadley, J. B. Holberg, Matt J. Holman, Steve B. Howell, Leopoldo Infante, Zeljko Ivezic, Suzanne H. Jacoby, Bhuvnesh Jain, R, Jedicke, M. James Jee, J. Garrett Jernigan, Saurabh W. Jha, Kathryn V. Johnston, R. Lynne Jones, Mario Juric, Mikko Kaasalainen, Styliani, Kafka, Steven M. Kahn, Nathan A. Kaib, Jason Kalirai, Jeff Kantor, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Charles R. Keeton, Richard Kessler, Zoran Knezevic, Adam Kowalski, Victor L. Krabbendam, K. Simon Krughoff, Shrinivas Kulkarni, Stephen Kuhlman, Mark Lacy, Sebastien Lepine, Ming Liang, Amy Lien, Paulina Lira, Knox S. Long, Suzanne Lorenz, Jennifer M. Lotz, R. H. Lupton, Julie Lutz, Lucas M. Macri, Ashish A. Mahabal, Rachel Mandelbaum, Phil Marshall, Morgan May, Peregrine M. McGehee, Brian T. Meadows, Alan Meert, Andrea Milani, Christopher J. Miller, Michelle Miller, David Mills, Dante Minniti, David Monet, Anjum S. Mukadam, Ehud Nakar, Douglas R. Neill, Jeffrey A. Newman, Sergei Nikolaev, Martin Nordby, Paul O'Connor, Masamune Oguri, John Oliver, Scot S. Olivier, Julia K. Olsen, Knut Olsen, Edward W. Olszewski, Hakeem Oluseyi, Nelson D. Padilla, Alex Parker, Joshua Pepper, John R. Peterson, Catherine Petry, Philip A. Pinto, James L. Pizagno, Bogdan Popescu, Andrej Prsa, Veljko Radcka, M. Jordan Raddick, Andrew Rasmussen, Arne Rau, Jeonghee Rho, James E. Rhoads, Gordon T. Richards, Stephen T. Ridgway, Brant E. Robertson, Rok Roskar, Abhijit Saha, Ata Sarajedini, Evan Scannapieco, Terry Schalk, Rafe Schindler, Samuel Schmidt, Sarah Schmidt, Donald P. Schneider, German Schumacher, Ryan Scranton, Jacques Sebag, Lynn G. Seppala, Ohad Shemmer, Joshua D. Simon, M. Sivertz, Howard A. Smith, J. Allyn Smith, Nathan Smith, Anna H. Spitz, Adam Stanford, Keivan G. Stassun, Jay Strader, Michael A. Strauss, Christopher W. Stubbs, Donald W. Sweeney, Alex Szalay, Paula Szkody, Masahiro Takada, Paul Thorman, David E. Trilling, Virginia Trimble, Anthony Tyson, Richard Van Berg, Daniel Vanden Berk, Jake VanderPlas, Licia Verde, Bojan Vrsnak, Lucianne M. Walkowicz, Benjamin D. Wandelt, Sheng Wang, Yun Wang, Michael Warner, Risa H. Wechsler, Andrew A. West, Oliver Wiecha, Benjamin F. Williams, Beth Willman, David Wittman, Sidney C. Wolff, W. Michael Wood-Vasey, Przemek Wozniak, Patrick Young, Andrew Zentner, Hu Zhan

TL;DR

The LSST Science Book articulates a bold vision for a decade-long, wide-fast-deep optical survey that will transform multiple domains of astrophysics. It translates ambitious science goals into concrete system design: a 6.5–8.4 m aperture, a 9.6 deg^2 field of view, six-filter ugrizy coverage, and a data management framework capable of real-time alerts and public data releases. The document details performance models, calibration strategies, and simulations that underpin predictions for billions of stars and galaxies, hundreds of millions of solar-system objects, and an unprecedented census of the transient sky. By coupling a comprehensive hardware/software plan with an expansive science program in Solar System science, Milky Way structure, transients, and cosmology, LSST promises transformative, widely accessible datasets and a lasting impact on astrophysics and public engagement.

Abstract

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

TL;DR

The LSST Science Book articulates a bold vision for a decade-long, wide-fast-deep optical survey that will transform multiple domains of astrophysics. It translates ambitious science goals into concrete system design: a 6.5–8.4 m aperture, a 9.6 deg^2 field of view, six-filter ugrizy coverage, and a data management framework capable of real-time alerts and public data releases. The document details performance models, calibration strategies, and simulations that underpin predictions for billions of stars and galaxies, hundreds of millions of solar-system objects, and an unprecedented census of the transient sky. By coupling a comprehensive hardware/software plan with an expansive science program in Solar System science, Milky Way structure, transients, and cosmology, LSST promises transformative, widely accessible datasets and a lasting impact on astrophysics and public engagement.

Abstract

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 313 sections, 51 equations, 160 figures, 20 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Astronomy-Physics Interaction
  3. What a Telescope with Enormous Étendue can Accomplish
  4. The History of the Idea
  5. Overview of LSST Science
  6. The LSST Science Requirements
  7. Defining the Telescope Design Parameters
  8. The Aperture Size
  9. The Optimal Exposure Time
  10. LSST System Design
  11. The LSST Observing Strategy
  12. Observatory Site
  13. Optics and Telescope Design
  14. Camera
  15. Filters
  16. ...and 298 more sections

Figures (160)

  • Figure 1: (a) The coadded depth in the $r$ band (AB magnitudes) vs. the effective aperture and the survey lifetime. It is assumed that 22% of the total observing time (corrected for weather and other losses) is allocated for the $r$ band, and that the ratio of the surveyed sky area to the field-of-view area is 2,000. (b) The single-visit depth in the $r$ band ($5 \sigma$ detection for point sources, AB magnitudes) vs. revisit time, $n$ (days), as a function of the effective aperture size. With a coverage of 10,000 deg$^2$ in two bands, the revisit time directly constrains the visit exposure time, $t_{vis} = 10 n$ seconds; these numbers can be directly scaled to the 20,000 deg$^2$ and six filters of LSST. In addition to direct constraints on optimal exposure time, $t_{vis}$ is also driven by requirements on the revisit time, $n$, the total number of visits per sky position over the survey lifetime, $N_{visit}$, and the survey efficiency, $\epsilon$ (see \ref{['eq:introduction:epsilon']}). Note that these constraints result in a fairly narrow range of allowed $t_{vis}$ for the main deep-wide-fast survey. From Ivezic++08.
  • Figure 2: The distribution of the $r$ band visits on the sky for one simulated realization of the baseline main survey. The sky is shown in Aitoff projection in equatorial coordinates and the number of visits for a 10-year survey is color-coded according to the inset. The two regions with smaller number of visits than the main survey ("mini-surveys") are the Galactic plane (arc on the left) and the so-called "northern Ecliptic region" (upper right). The region around the South Celestial Pole will also receive substantial coverage (not shown here).
  • Figure 3: Artist's rendering of the LSST and dome enclosure on the summit of Cerro Pachón. The Auxiliary calibration telescope (\ref{['sec:design:calsim']}) is also illustrated on a neighboring peak. (Image Credit: Michael Mullen Design, LSST Corporation.)
  • Figure 4: The distribution of "seeing" (FWHM of the image of a point source) at 500 nm based on ten years of measurements from CTIO (10 km from the LSST site). The red curve shows results from a Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM), while the blue curve shows the delivered image quality. The mean is $0.67"$, and the median is $0.59"$.
  • Figure 5: The optical design configuration showing the telescope (left) and camera (right) layouts. Diffraction images in $r$ for three field radii, 0, 1.0, and 1.75 degrees, are shown in boxes 0.6 arcseconds square ($3\times 3$ pixels).
  • ...and 155 more figures