The Case for a 30m Diameter Submillimeter Telescope on the Antarctic Plateau

• Main Author: Antony A. Stark
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2003
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Webb; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.257.2660; http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0309005v1.pdf

Abstract. A large single-dish submillimeter-wave telescope equipped with a focal plane array containing ∼ 10 4 bolometers and costing about $120M could locate most protogalaxies in the southern sky within a year of operation. Many of the telescopes planned for the next few decades are designed to observe high-redshift galaxies in the process of formation (NRC 2001). These instruments, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Over-Whelmingly Large Telescope (OWL), and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), will have sufficient sensitivity and resolution to observe detailed structure within protogalaxies; they will not, however, have sufficient field of view to survey large areas of sky and discover objects to study. Consider, for example, the ALMA. As seen in Figure 1, protogalaxies typically have a flux density at λ450µm which is ∼ < 10 mJy. The ALMA can detect such a source in 3 minutes of observing time. That’s really fast. The size of an ALMA map, however, is ∼ 2 × 10 −5 square degree, so to survey a square degree at this sensitivity would