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

. 1 The Antarctic Plateau provides the pre-eminent conditions on the Earth for widefield 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 \Theta 1024) IR array camera (Abu) to demonstrate this potential. Wi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Michael Burton John, John W. V. Storey, Michael C. B. Ashley
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: McLean (Kluwer 1998
Subjects:
Antarctic
Hubble
South Pole
The Antarctic
Antarc*
Antarctica
South pole
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.27.1389
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mgb/Antbib/lookingdeep.ps.gz
Description
Summary:. 1 The Antarctic Plateau provides the pre-eminent conditions on the Earth for widefield 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 \Theta 1024) IR array camera (Abu) to demonstrate this potential. With it we aim to survey the Large Magallenic Cloud for sites of massive star formation at 3.5m at the 1.4" diffraction 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 Introduction Understanding star formation is an active research area in contemporary astrophysics. Of interest is the study of proce.

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