The CCAT Observatory: Science and Facility

¹ Department of Astronomy, Cornell University, USA
² Argelander-Institute for Astronomy, the University of Bonn, Germany
³ Department of Physics, University of Cologne, Germany
⁴ Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado, USA
⁵ Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, UK
⁶ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Calgary, Canada

Abstract

CCAT is a 25 meter submm telescope proposed to be built at 5600 meters elevation on Cerro Chajnantor overlooking the ALMA site in northern Chile. The CCAT site is the best submm site that is accessible by truck, so that with its large aperture, exceptionally good surface accuracy (∼17 μm rms total wavefront error, WFE), state-of-the-art instrumentation and large (≥20 arcmin) field-of-view (FoV) CCAT will deliver unsurpassed point source sensitivity and mapping speeds across the submm telluric windows. Our primary science goals are: (1) to trace the obscurred star formation (SF) history of the Universe through multicolor submm surveys of 100's deg² on the sky followed up by spectroscopy to characterize the energy sources in dusty SF galaxies; (2) to measure and characterize the SF process in the Milky Way galaxy and nearby resolved galaxies through submm spectroscopic and dust continuum surveys; and (3) to probe galaxy cluster astrophysics through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect.