Abstract

The Simons Observatory is a new millimetre-wave observatory in Chile that started commissioning late last year. Its largest 6-metre telescope will measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over half the sky with five times the resolution of the Planck satellite, and should reach ten times the sensitivity. Its smaller telescopes are targeting a deeper region, seeking a polarized CMB signal imprinted by primordial gravitational waves. The large-telescope survey overlaps with the Rubin LSST sky region, and has overlap with DESI and Euclid, providing a route to mapping the large-scale distribution of dark matter and gas through lensing and Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effects. By surveying half the sky every couple of days, we also hope to see new types of transient astronomical events in millimetre-wavelengths with SO, and track the light-curves of thousands of active galactic nuclei. In this talk I will describe the status of SO and its science plans.