Science Impacts of the SPHEREx All-Sky Optical to Near-Infrared Spectral Survey: Report of a Community Workshop Examining Extragalactic, Galactic, Stellar and Planetary Science

Abstract

SPHEREx is a proposed SMEX mission selected for Phase A. SPHEREx will carry out the first all-sky spectral survey and provide for every 6.2" pixel a spectra between 0.75 and 4.18 $\mu$m [with R$\sim$41.4] and 4.18 and 5.00 $\mu$m [with R$\sim$135]. The SPHEREx team has proposed three specific science investigations to be carried out with this unique data set: cosmic inflation, interstellar and circumstellar ices, and the extra-galactic background light. It is readily apparent, however, that many other questions in astrophysics and planetary sciences could be addressed with the SPHEREx data. The SPHEREx team convened a community workshop in February 2016, with the intent of enlisting the aid of a larger group of scientists in defining these questions. This paper summarizes the rich and varied menu of investigations that was laid out. It includes studies of the composition of main belt and Trojan/Greek asteroids; mapping the zodiacal light with unprecedented spatial and spectral resolution; identifying and studying very low-metallicity stars; improving stellar parameters in order to better characterize transiting exoplanets; studying aliphatic and aromatic carbon-bearing molecules in the interstellar medium; mapping star formation rates in nearby galaxies; determining the redshift of clusters of galaxies; identifying high redshift quasars over the full sky; and providing a NIR spectrum for most eROSITA X-ray sources. All of these investigations, and others not listed here, can be carried out with the nominal all-sky spectra to be produced by SPHEREx. In addition, the workshop defined enhanced data products and user tools which would facilitate some of these scientific studies. Finally, the workshop noted the high degrees of synergy between SPHEREx and a number of other current or forthcoming programs, including JWST, WFIRST, Euclid, GAIA, K2/Kepler, TESS, eROSITA and LSST.

arXiv commentReport of the First SPHEREx Community Workshop, http://spherex.caltech.edu/Workshop.html , 84 pages, 28 figures

Cited by in corpus (26)

• Gravitational probes of dark matter physics
• The impact of relativistic effects on cosmological parameter estimation
• Predictions and sensitivity forecasts for reionization-era [C II] line intensity mapping
• SPHEREx: NASA's Near-Infrared Spectrophotmetric All-Sky Survey
• Empirical Bolometric Fluxes and Angular Diameters of 1.6 Million Tycho-2 Stars and Radii of 350,000 Stars with \emph{Gaia} DR1 Parallaxes
• Astrophysics & Cosmology from Line Intensity Mapping vs Galaxy Surveys
• The next non-Gaussianity frontier: what can a measurement with $\sigma (f_{\mathrm{NL}})\lesssim 1$ tell us about multifield inflation?
• Signatures of primordial black holes in gravitational wave clustering
• Extracting bias using the cross-bispectrum: An EoR and 21 cm-[CII]-[CII] case study
• Identification of Lensed Gravitational Waves with Deep Learning
• Deep learning for intensity mapping observations: Component extraction
• Identification of AKARI infrared sources by Deep HSC Optical Survey: Construction of New Band-Merged Catalogue in the NEP-Wide field
• Measuring Model-independent Masses and Radii of Single-Lined Eclipsing Binaries: Analytic Precision Estimates
• HD 145263: Spectral Observations of Silica Debris Disk Formation via Extreme Space Weathering?
• Constraining extended cosmologies with GW$\times$LSS cross-correlations
• Radio Afterglows from Compact Binary Coalescences: Prospects for Next-Generation Telescopes
• Estimates for the impact of Ultraviolet Background fluctuations on galaxy clustering measurements
• Extreme Spheres: Counts-in-cells for 21cm intensity mapping
• Estimating the Feasibility of 21cm-Ly$\alpha$ Synergies using the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array
• Environmental Effects on AGN activity via Extinction-free Mid-Infrared Census
• Cosmology at high redshift -- a probe of fundamental physics
• An Analytical Study of the Primordial Gravitational-Wave-Induced Contribution to the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe
• Searching for axion-like particles with SPHEREx
• Opportunities in Time-Domain Extragalactic Astrophysics with the NASA Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam)
• Signatures of Primordial Gravitational Waves on the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe
• Testing the growth of cosmic structures during the Dark Ages