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SUMMARY:Astronomy in the era of the LSST: understanding our universe a bit
  at a time - Andrew Connolly (Univ of Washington)
DTSTART:20141113T163000Z
DTEND:20141113T173000Z
UID:TALK55149@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Simon Hodgkin
DESCRIPTION:With the development of new detectors\, telescopes and computa
 tional facilities\, survey astrophysics is entering an era where deep opti
 cal surveys are possible for a large fraction of the visible sky. One of t
 he largest of these surveys\, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)\,
  will comprise an 8.4 m primary mirror with a 9.6 square degree field-of-v
 iew and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. Over the ten years of its operation\, the 
 LSST will survey half of the sky in six optical colors\, discovering 37 bi
 llion stars and galaxies and detecting about 10 million variable or transi
 ent sources every night. In this talk I will briefly describe the potentia
 l of the LSST for studying the nature of dark matter and dark energy\, for
  measuring the properties of our Galaxy\, and for creating a census of our
  Solar System. I will then focus on some of the challenges we will face wh
 en analyzing data that\, while massive in size\, is intrinsically noisy an
 d incomplete and how we are using simulations and models to address the qu
 estion of how can we optimize the science of the LSST.
LOCATION:Sackler Lecture Theatre\, IoA (tea at 4:00 pm)
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