亚太大口径亚毫米望远镜 (AtLAST) 的关键科学驱动力

亚毫米和毫米波提供了独特的宇宙视角，从包围星系的气体和尘埃到我们太阳的染色层。当前的单波段设施呈现了最亮 (亚-)毫米源的诱人景观，而干涉仪提供了分析小场区域细节所必需的卓越分辨率，但仍有许多问题无法通过现有设施回答：Where are all the baryons? How do structures interact with their environments? What does the time-varying (sub-)mm sky look like? In order to make major advances on these questions and others, what is needed now is a facility capable of rapidly mapping the sky spatially, spectrally, and temporally, which can only be done by a high throughput, single-dish observatory. An extensive design study for this new facility is currently being undertaken. In this paper, we focus on the key science drivers and the requirements they place on the observatory. As a 50m single dish telescope with a 1-2{\deg} field of view, the strength of the Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) is in science where a large field of view, highly multiplexed instrumentation and sensitivity to faint large-scale structure is important. AtLAST aims to be a sustainable, upgradeable, multipurpose facility that will deliver orders of magnitude increases in sensitivity and mapping speeds over current and planned telescopes.