Science with the Brazilian robotic telescope

Abstract

This thematic grant application is the natural continuation of a previous successful project funded by FAPESP to build a 0.8m-aperture optical robotic telescope+wide camera, and implement an optical survey over a large area of the southern sky. The telescope, T80-South, and its large-format camera were mounted and successfully comissioned at Cerro Tololo, Chile, and they are now in regular operation. T80-South is equipped with a 9.2k x 9.2k e2v detector with 10-micron pixels, giving a field-of-view of 2 square degrees,with a plate scale of 0.55 arcsec per pixel. In its first years of operation, T80-South will be dedicated to the survey called S-PLUS (Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey). The present proposal has the main goal to maximize the science outcome from the several sub-surveys of S-PLUS, which is imaging 9300 square degrees of the celestial sphere in twelve optical bands, to obtain data for a community of over 100 astronomers. The survey consists of four main subfields. These include two non-contiguous fields at high Galactic latitudes (|b| > 30 deg, 8000 square degrees) and two areas of the Galactic plane and bulge (for an additional 1300 square degrees. S-PLUS uses the Javalambre 12-band magnitude system, which includes ugriz broad-band filters and 7 narrow-band filters centred on prominent stellar spectral features: [OII], Ca H+K, Hdelta, G-band, Mgb triplet, Halpha and Ca triplet. S-PLUS delivers accurate photometric redshifts ($\delta_{z}/(1+z)=0.02$ or better) for galaxies with r<0 and z<0.5, thus providing a map of the local universe. It also allows the study of star formation and stellar populations in and around the Milky Way and nearby galaxies,and it enables searches for quasars, variable sources, and low-metallicity and carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars. The first public data release of 336 square degrees of the Stripe-82 area is available at https://datalab.noao.edu/splus. This grant is to be able to FINISH the survey that we started so successfully with the previous Fapesp investment of 2M dollars (from process 2009/54202-8). We note that this is the largest Brazilian-led survey project ever performed and its successful completion is vital for the development of our community both in the technical and the scientific aspects, and for performing even more complex projects in the future. (AU)