Event Details

Astrophysics seminar

Abstract: The start of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Vera Rubin Observatory is rapidly approaching. This revolution in photometric discovery will be matched by an equally impressive improvement in spectroscopic resource from the 4m Multi-Object Spectrograph Telescope (4MOST). We present the Time Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) on 4MOST. TiDES will use 250,000 fibre hours to spectroscopically classify live LSST transients to z~0.5, we will obtain host galaxy redshifts for photometrically identified transients to z~0.8, and monitor 700 AGN for a reverberation mapping experiment out to z~2.5. As part of our preparation for the start of operations, we have performed simulations of several different LSST strategies and convolved them with 4MOST simulations to curate realistic datasets of spectroscopically observed events and their hosts. Our results demonstrate an ability to obtain spectra for tens-of-thousands of objects to populate the time-domain phase space. This will be by-far the largest sample of SNe and hosts from a single survey. We also show that TiDES will provide the best constraints on the dark energy equations of state parameter, w, from any supernova cosmology survey in the LSST era.

If someone from outside of the Astrophysics group would like to join the seminar, please send a request to i.garland@lancaster.ac.uk