Sciences with the 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST)
Abstract
The Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is a dedicated photometric surveying facility being built jointly by the University of Science and Technology of China and the Purple Mountain Observatory. It is equipped with a 2.5-meter diameter primary mirror, an active optics system, and a mosaic CCD camera with 0.73 gigapixels on the primary focal plane for high-quality image capture over an FOV of 6.5-square-degree. It is anticipated that WFST will be set up at the Lenghu site in the summer of 2023 and begin to observe the northern sky in four optical bands (u, g, r, and i) with a range of cadences, from hourly/daily in the Deep High-Cadence Survey (DHS) program to semiweekly in the Wide-Field Survey (WFS) program, three months later. During a photometric night, a nominal 30 s exposure in the WFS program will reach a depth of 22.27, 23.32, 22.84, and 22.31 (AB magnitudes) in these four bands, respectively, allowing for the detection of a tremendous amount of transients in the low-z universe and a systematic investigation of the variability of Galactic and extragalactic objects. In the DHS program, intranight 90 s exposures as deep as 23 (u) and 24 mag (g), in combination with target of opportunity follow-ups, will provide a unique opportunity to explore energetic transients in demand for high sensitivities, including the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events, supernovae within a few hours of their explosions, tidal disruption events and fast, luminous optical transients even beyond a redshift of unity. In addition, the final 6-year co-added images, anticipated to reach g=25.8 mag in WFS or 1.5 mags deeper in DHS, will be of fundamental importance to general Galactic and extragalactic science. The highly uniform legacy surveys of WFST will serve as an indispensable complement to those of LSST that monitor the southern sky.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2306.07590,
title = {Sciences with the 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST)},
author = {WFST Collaboration and Tinggui Wang and Guilin Liu and Zhenyi Cai and Jinjun Geng and Min Fang and Haoning He and Ji-an Jiang and Ning Jiang and Xu Kong and Bin Li and Ye Li and Wentao Luo and Zhizheng Pan and Xuefeng Wu and Ji Yang and Jiming Yu and Xianzhong Zheng and Qingfeng Zhu and Yi-Fu Cai and Yuanyuan Chen and Zhiwei Chen and Zigao Dai and Lulu Fan and Yizhong Fan and Wenjuan Fang and Zhicheng He and Lei Hu and Maokai Hu and Zhiping Jin and Zhibo Jiang and Guoliang Li and Fan Li and Xuzhi Li and Runduo Liang and Zheyu Lin and Qingzhong Liu and Wenhao Liu and Zhengyan Liu and Wei Liu and Yao Liu and Zheng Lou and Han Qu and Zhenfeng Sheng and Jianchun Shi and Yiping Shu and Zhenbo Su and Tianrui Sun and Hongchi Wang and Huiyuan Wang and Jian Wang and Junxian Wang and Daming Wei and Junjie Wei and Yongquan Xue and Jingzhi Yan and Chao Yang and Ye Yuan and Yefei Yuan and Hongxin Zhang and Miaomiao Zhang and Haibin Zhao and Wen Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.07590},
year = {2023}
}
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48 pages