Science with the Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX)
Abstract
UVEX is a proposed medium class Explorer mission designed to provide crucial missing capabilities that will address objectives central to a broad range of modern astrophysics. The UVEX design has two co-aligned wide-field imagers operating in the FUV and NUV and a powerful broadband medium resolution spectrometer. In its two-year baseline mission, UVEX will perform a multi-cadence synoptic all-sky survey 50/100 times deeper than GALEX in the NUV/FUV, cadenced surveys of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, rapid target of opportunity followup, as well as spectroscopic followup of samples of stars and galaxies. The science program is built around three pillars. First, UVEX will explore the low-mass, low-metallicity galaxy frontier through imaging and spectroscopic surveys that will probe key aspects of the evolution of galaxies by understanding how star formation and stellar evolution at low metallicities affect the growth and evolution of low-metallicity, low-mass galaxies in the local universe. Such galaxies contain half the mass in the local universe, and are analogs for the first galaxies, but observed at distances that make them accessible to detailed study. Second, UVEX will explore the dynamic universe through time-domain surveys and prompt spectroscopic followup capability will probe the environments, energetics, and emission processes in the early aftermaths of gravitational wave-discovered compact object mergers, discover hot, fast UV transients, and diagnose the early stages of stellar explosions. Finally, UVEX will become a key community resource by leaving a large all-sky legacy data set, enabling a wide range of scientific studies and filling a gap in the new generation of wide-field, sensitive optical and infrared surveys provided by the Rubin, Euclid, and Roman observatories. This paper discusses the scientific potential of UVEX, and the broad scientific program.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2111.15608,
title = {Science with the Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX)},
author = {S. R. Kulkarni and Fiona A. Harrison and Brian W. Grefenstette and Hannah P. Earnshaw and Igor Andreoni and Danielle A. Berg and Joshua S. Bloom and S. Bradley Cenko and Ryan Chornock and Jessie L. Christiansen and Michael W. Coughlin and Alexander Wuollet Criswell and Behnam Darvish and Kaustav K. Das and Kishalay De and Luc Dessart and Don Dixon and Bas Dorsman and Kareem El-Badry and Christopher Evans and K. E. Saavik Ford and Christoffer Fremling and Boris T. Gansicke and Suvi Gezari and Y. Goetberg and Gregory M. Green and Matthew J. Graham and Marianne Heida and Anna Y. Q. Ho and Amruta D. Jaodand and Christopher M. Johns-Krull and Mansi M. Kasliwal and Margaret Lazzarini and Wenbin Lu and Raffaella Margutti and D. Christopher Martin and Daniel Charles Masters and Barry McKernan and Yael Naze and Samaya M. Nissanke and B. Parazin and Daniel A. Perley and E. Sterl Phinney and Anthony L. Piro and G. Raaijmakers and Gregor Rauw and Antonio C. Rodriguez and Hugues Sana and Peter Senchyna and Leo P. Singer and Jessica J. Spake and Keivan G. Stassun and Daniel Stern and Harry I. Teplitz and Daniel R. Weisz and Yuhan Yao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.15608},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
69 pages, 43 figures