Thirty-four years after scientists first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama.
FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang.
FYST is a project of the Cornell-University-led CCAT Observatory, Inc., a collaboration that includes Germany’s University of Cologne, University of Bonn and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and a Canadian consortium of universities led by Professor Mike Fich (Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics, University of Waterloo), in conjunction with Chilean astronomers through the University of Chile.
The telescope features an innovative optical design that allows astronomers to observe over a wide field-of-view in each exposure, enabling them to rapidly and efficiently map wide areas of the sky. Operating in the submillimeter wavelength range of light, FYST will create movies of the sky – “celestial cinematography” – in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum where this has never before been done.
“The Canadian CCAT team, at over a dozen institutions across the country, is eagerly awaiting the wealth of fantastic data that will begin to flow from FYST in a few months,” said Dr. Michel Fich, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Waterloo and Canadian CCAT project leader. “In addition to significant contributions to the construction of the telescope itself, the Canadian team is also creating software for both the Observatory and for data reduction, providing a central part of the telescope instrumentation, and leading key science projects.”
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