The Large Array Survey Telescope -- Science Goals

Abstract

The Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST) is designed to survey the variable and transient sky at high temporal cadence. The array is comprised of 48 F/2.2 telescopes of 27.9cm aperture, coupled to full-frame backside-illuminated cooled CMOS detectors with $3.76$$\mu$m pixels, resulting in a pixel scale of $1.25\mathrm{arcsec}$. A single telescope with a field of view of $7.4{\mathrm{deg}}^2$ reaches a $5\sigma$ limiting magnitude of $19.6$ in $20$s. LAST 48 telescopes are mounted on 12 independent mounts -- a modular design which allows us to conduct optimized parallel surveys. Here we provide a detailed overview of the LAST survey strategy and its key scientific goals. These include the search for gravitational-wave (GW) electromagnetic counterparts with a system that can cover the uncertainty regions of the next-generation GW detectors in a single exposure, the study of planetary systems around white dwarfs, and the search for near-Earth objects. LAST is currently being commissioned, with full scientific operations expected in mid 2023. This paper is accompanied by two complementary publications in this issue, giving an overview of the system (Ofek et al. 2023a) and of the dedicated data reduction pipeline (Ofek et al. 2023b).

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Minutes-duration Optical Flares with Supernova Luminosities
• Accurate photometric calibration by fitting the system transmission
• Detecting the early optical flashes of gamma-ray bursts with small telescope arrays
• The Type IIn SN 2025cbj coincidence with the high-energy neutrino IceCube-250421A
• The Large Array Survey Telescope-Pipeline. II. Image Subtraction and Transient Detection
• Science with a large field-of-view polarization survey: The Large Array Survey Telescope Polarization Node (LAST-P)
• Single object observations: Large telescopes vs. multiple small telescopes