The National Science Foundation's AST Portfolio Review of 2012 is Not Relevant to the Green Bank Telescope of 2017: A White Paper

Abstract

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy Division's Portfolio Review of 2012 is no longer relevant to the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) of 2017 for two principal reasons, one instrumental and the other astrophysical: 1) The GBT has begun significant operations in the 3mm band, giving it unrivaled capabilities for spectroscopy and continuum studies over 67-116 GHz. It is now an instrument that is unique worldwide and is a critical complement to ALMA for the U.S. scientific community. These capabilities had not been implemented at the time of the review. 2) The detection of gravitational radiation by LIGO in 2015 places the GBT's work on pulsar observations of nano-Hz gravitational radiation at the forefront of modern astrophysics. The Green Bank Telescope of 2017 is not the GBT that was reviewed by the Eisenstein-Miller committee in 2012, a review that was specific to the NSF Astronomy portfolio. The GBT serves a wide spectrum of science areas including physics, chemistry, and planetary studies as well as astronomy. Besides its well-documented intellectual merit, it thus has a significant broader impact. The GBT is making significance advances in our understanding of gravitational waves, the equation-of-state of nuclear matter, the mass of supermassive black holes, the value of H0, and the physics of star-formation, all key science goals for astronomy identified in a recent National Academy study "New Worlds, New Horizons: A Midterm Assessment". In the era of ALMA and LIGO, other countries have bolstered their mm-wave and cm-wave facilities; it is critical that U.S. scientists have ready access to a large filled aperture to remain at the forefront of research.

arXiv commentA White Paper for community discussion

References in corpus (19)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• Shapiro delay measurement of a two solar mass neutron star
• Dense magnetized plasma associated with a fast radio burst
• The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies
• A millisecond pulsar in a stellar triple system
• The NANOGrav Nine-year Data Set: Limits on the Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background
• Constraints on cosmic string tension imposed by the limit on the stochastic gravitational wave background from the European Pulsar Timing Array
• Characterising gravitational wave stochastic background anisotropy with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• A VLBI Resolution of the Pleiades Distance Controversy
• The Final Parsec Problem
• Constraining the Solution to the Last Parsec Problem with Pulsar Timing
• Abundant cyanopolyynes as a probe of infall in the Serpens South cluster-forming region
• Discrete clouds of neutral gas between the galaxies M31 and M33
• A 1.05 $M_{\odot }$ Companion to PSR J2222-0137: The Coolest Known White Dwarf?
• Holographic Measurement and Improvement of the Green Bank Telescope Surface
• Water Masers in the Andromeda Galaxy: The First Step Toward Proper Motion
• Minimum Requirements for Detecting a Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background Using Pulsars
• Pulsar Timing Arrays: No longer a Blunt Instrument for Gravitational Wave Detection
• White Paper on Nuclear Astrophysics