The SCUBA-2 All-Sky Survey (SASSy), is a major astronomical experiment using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii.[1] A team of around 50 astronomers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Holland, and Japan aim to map a huge swathe of the sky to find rare galaxies and stars being formed. Contrary to its name, the project will at most only be able to map the sky that is visible from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii; this counter-intuitive naming has precedents in professional astronomy.[2] [3] [4] SASSy is one of the major "legacy surveys" on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.[5] It is the second-largest such legacy survey in terms of time on this telescope, and in terms of notional facility time is "worth" over £1 million.
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Scientific goals of SASSy
This project seeks to answer the following questions:
- Is there an undiscovered population of extreme luminosity galaxies?
- What are the number counts of bright sub-mm galaxies?
- What is the fraction of lensed sub-mm sources?
- Is there an undiscovered population of cold local galaxies?
- How many infrared dark clouds are there in our Galaxy and how are they distributed?
- What is the relation of infrared dark clouds to star formation and Galactic structure?
- Is there an underlying unknown population of star formation?
- What is the fraction of clustered vs isolated star formation?
- What is the answer to the distributed T-Tauri problem?
This project will also assist in the foreground subtraction and calibration of the Plank microwave background satellite.[6]
Institutions involved
The project was led initially by Dr. Mark Thompson and Dr. Stephen Serjeant (University of Hertfordshire and Open University respectively), now expanded to a four-person co-ordinating team with the addition of Dr. Timothy Jenness and Prof. Douglas Scott (Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii, and University of British Columbia respectively). The following institutions are represented in SASSy:
- Cardiff University, UK
- European Space Agency
- Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics / NRC, Canada
- Imperial College London, UK
- Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan
- Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii, USA
- Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, The Netherlands
- Keele University, UK
- Liverpool John Moores University, UK
- Open University, UK
- Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
- SRON, The Netherlands
- UK Astronomy Technology Centre, UK
- Université Laval, Canada
- University College London, UK
- University of British Columbia, Canada
- University of Cambridge, UK
- University of Edinburgh, UK
- University of Exeter, UK
- University of Hertfordshire, UK
- University of Kent, UK
- University of St Andrews, UK
- University of Waterloo, Canada
