Looking Deep from the South Pole: Star Formation in the Thermal Infrared 7

• Main Authors: Michael G. Burton, John W. V. Storey, Michael C. B. Ashley
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: McLean (Kluwer 1996
• Subjects: Antarctic; Hubble; South Pole; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.147.9608; http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mcba/pubs/burton98a.pdf

Abstract. 1 The Antarctic Plateau provides the pre-eminent conditions on the Earth for wideeld imaging at thermal infrared wavelengths. We describe a project to equip the 60 cm SPIREX telescope at the South Pole with a large format (1024 1024) IR array camera (Abu) to demonstrate this potential.Withitwe aim to survey the Large Magallenic Cloud for sites of massive star formation at 3.5 m at the 1.4 " di raction limit of the telescope. We also discuss the potential for studying extra-galactic star formation through a deep survey of the Hubble Deep Field{South in this band. We compare the sensitivity of such surveys from Antarctica with those from mid-latitude sites, and propose a 2 m-class telescope, SPIRIT, which would be able to achieve unique new science at low cost compared to the new generation of 8 m-class telescopes now under construction. 1