Concept Feasibility Study for a High-Performance Telescope Array

Very dim galaxies challenge our understanding of how all galaxies formed. This project will construct a telescope optimized for studying such galaxies. It will use several refracting telescopes to form the equivalent of one larger telescope. This telescope will be used to study the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy and other galaxies. The telescope will also be used to search for Earth-like and even sub-Earth-mass planets around nearby stars. It will be made available to educators and for public outreach. The project will develop, implement and promote a new software infrastructure that allows access to the telescope array to be allocated on either a per-hour or per-observation basis. Credits for access to the telescope array will be distributed to researchers, educators, and public outreach institutions. Recent developments indicate that (1) ultra-low-surface-brightness galaxies pose a significant challenge to galaxy formation and evolution scenarios and (2) telescope arrays built from off-the-shelf refracting telescopes are ideally suited to identifying and studying these galaxies. Further, due to rapidly developing commercial CMOS technology, very large-format (150 Mega-Pixel), very rapid-read-time (less than one second), very low-read-noise (less than one electron) CMOS cameras are just now becoming available. This project will exploit these developments by building a high-performance telescope array, located in the Southern Hemisphere, to obtain deep images of regions of the sky at an unprecedentedly rapid cadence of 60 seconds. The low-surface-brightness sensitivity of the array will enable studying the very outer regions of the Milky Way, LMC, SMC, and other nearby galaxies and detecting ultra-diffuse galaxies in nearby clusters and in the field. The rapid cadence of the array will enable detecting transiting Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of white dwarfs and studying microlensing signatures of Earth- and sub-Earth-mass extra-solar planets and asteroids toward the Galactic bulge. This project has a high potential to yield unexpected discoveries. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.