Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope

What is FYST? The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) is a 6-meter/20 feet diameter next-generation telescope operating at submillimeter to millimeter wavelengths and sited at an elevation of 5,600 meters/18,400 feet on Cerro Chajnantor in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The novel two-mirror design produces a high-throughput wide-field-of-view telescope capable of hosting a camera with more than 100,000 individual detectors so that large areas of the sky can be scanned rapidly. Breakthrough science goals enabled by legacy surveys motivate the unique characteristics and location of the FYST. The telescope itself was designed and constructed by CPI Vertex Antennentechnik GmbH of Duisburg, Germany. Why submillimeter astronomy? Observations of the sky at submillimeter wavelengths allow astronomers to observe the “cold” universe, the clouds of molecular gas and dust that are not visible to optical telescopes like Hubble, Rubin or the VLT. Studying the distribution, physical conditions and composition of these clouds yields unique insight into the earliest stages of star and planet formation and the evolution of dust-obscured galaxies and supermassive black holes across cosmic time. In addition, submillimeter observations are critical to the interpretation of maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) used to probe fundamental questions of cosmology, gravitational waves, dark energy and dark matter. Why Cerro Chajnantor? Submillimeter radiation from the cosmos is absorbed by water vapor molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, necessitating the location of the FYST at a high and dry site. Even the expansive plateau that hosts the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is higher than Mont Blanc and any peak in the Rocky Mountains range of North America. The substantially higher CCAT site offers superb observing conditions, allowing routine access to the 350-micron window and improved performance at longer wavelengths. From an astronomer’s perspective, the southern hemisphere location is particularly beneficial as the center of the Milky Way sweeps across its zenith and more than 90% of the whole sky is visible over the course of a day. What questions will FYST address? The science program envisaged for FYST includes a suite of major mapping surveys that exploit the telescope’s unique capabilities and are undertaken by teams of scientists from the partner institutions. With its state-of-the-art PrimeCam camera and spectrometer, FYST will discover and catalog the dusty, star forming galaxies responsible for the reionization of the Universe at the end of the epoch of “Cosmic Dawn” a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, trace their evolution from then through “Cosmic Noon” and use them to test models of universal expansion. Of special note, FYST maps of the CMB and the emission from dust in our Milky Way galaxy will contribute important constraints on the theory of inflation and new types of fundamental particles. It will also measure the growth and motions of the massive clusters of galaxies by observing with great precision how the CMB photons interact with electrons in the hot gas that pervades the clusters (the “Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (S-Z) effect”), thereby constraining theories of dark matter and dark energy. In our own Galaxy, FYST will map the dust emission across the Milky Way to determine the role of turbulence and magnetic fields in the process of star formation. Using its CHAI spectrograph, FYST will explore the “galactic ecology” of the dynamic interstellar gas clouds found in distinctly different environments within the Milky Way and also our near neighbor galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds. Analysis of the survey data will also discover astronomical transients, sources which suddenly appear and then disappear from view, some of which are well-known and understood, while others are surprising and mysterious. 1. CMB polarimetry to probe gravitational waves from the inflationary epoch. 2. Line Intensity mappin