Institute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK...

Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge•

Madingley Rd, Cambridge CB3 0HA.United Kingdom

E-mail [email protected] Tel +44 (0)1223 766668

Kristina Bird (General Enquiries)

Scientific Organising Committee

Zeljko Ivezic (Chair: SOC) University of Washington, USA

Nicholas Walton (and Chair: LOC)Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK

Vasily BelokurovInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK

Andy ConnollyUniversity of Washington, USA

Zsolt FreiEotvos Lorand University, Budapest, H

Mario JuricLSST Corporation, USA

Robert LuptonPrinceton University, USA

Richard McMahonInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK

Reynald PainUniversite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, F

Timo PrustiESTEC, ESA, NL

Matthias SteinmetzLeibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), Potsdam, D

Lukasz WyrzykowskiWarsaw University Observatory, PL

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Session 6 Synergies - GaiaChair : Patricia WhitelockTimo PrustiESA

Annie RobinInstitut UTINAM

Wil O’MullaneEuropean Space Astronomy Centre

Session 7LSST Science Theme : Nearby Universe & TechniquesChair : Vasily BelokurovLaurent EyerGeneva Observatory

Rosanna SordoINAF - Padova Observatory

Maria-Rosa CioniAIP / University of Hertfordshire

Daniel ZuckerMacquarie University

Session 8 Synergies – RadioChair : Andy ConnollyMichael KramerMax Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy

Michael BrownJodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics,University of Manchester

Matt JarvisUniversity of Oxford & University of the Western Cape

Wednesday 11 September Session 9 LSST Science Theme :Galaxies and AGNChair : Zsolt FreiGuinevere KauffmannMax Planck Institute for Astrophysics

Ohad ShemmerUniversity of North Texas

Alexandre BoucaudParis Diderot University

Session 10LSST Science Theme : Galaxies and AGNChair : Richard McMahonHenry FergusonSpace Telescope Science Institute

Isobel HookUniversity of Oxford / INAF Obs. Rome

Michal ChodorowskiNicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center

Doron CheloucheUniversity of Haifa

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Monday 9 SeptemberSession 1LSST status and overviewChair : Nicholas WaltonSteven KahnStanford University / SLAC NationalAccelerator Laboratory

Zeljko IvezicUniversity of Washington

Mario JuricLSST

Session 2 LSST Science Theme : CosmologyChair : Zeljko IvezicTony TysonUniversity of California, Davis

Catherine HeymansInstitute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh

Sarah BridleUniversity of Manchester

Session 3 LSST Science Theme : CosmologyChair : Reynald PainBhuvnesh JainUniversity of Pennsylvania

Eiichiro KomatsuMax Planck Institute for Astrophysics

Heather CampbellInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Bram VenemanMax Planck Institute for Astronomy

Session 4 Euclid / eRosita, etcChair : Sarah BridleYannick MellierInstitut Astrophysique de Paris (IAP)

Kirpal NandraMax Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics

Manda BanerjiUniversity College London

Isobel HookUniversity of Oxford / INAF Obs. Rome

Roberto MignaniMullard Space Science Laboratory,University College London

Tuesday 10 September Session 5 LSST Science Theme :Nearby Universe + Milky WayChair : Timo PrustiVasily BelokurovInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Branimir SesarCaltech

Johan KnapenInstituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

Victor DebattistaJeremiah Horrocks Institute,University of Central Lancashire

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Wednesday 11 SeptemberSession 11Spectroscopic Follow-upChair : Sofia FeltzingRoelof de JongLeibniz-Institut für Astrophysik

Michele CirasuoloRoyal Observatory Edinburgh

Karin LindInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Chris CopperwheatLiverpool John Moores University

Thursday 12 September Session 13LSST Science Theme : Solar SystemChair : Mario JuricFrançois MignardObservatory of the Côte d’Azur

Karri MuinonenUniversity of Helsinki

Mikael GranvikUniversity of Helsinki

Session 14 Big Data : Big ScienceChair : Robert LuptonRob FenderUniversity of Southampton / University of Oxford

Andy ConnollyUniversity of Washington

Nicholas WaltonInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Jorge Sanchez AlmeidaInstituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

Session 15 LSST Science Theme : TransientsChair : Lukasz WyrzykowskiSuvi GezariUniversity of Maryland

Stephen SmarttQueen’s University Belfast

Simon HodgkinInstitute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Vladimir LipunovMoscow State University

Session 16Transient Follow-upChair : Nicholas WaltonSamaya NissankeCaltech

Lucianne WalkowiczPrinceton University

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Poster Index

A - Z

Marc BetouleLPNHE CNRS

Nadejda BlagorodnovaInstitute of Astronomy,University of Cambridge

Hervé BouyCenter for Astrobiology - CSIC

Chris DavisLiverpool Telescope /Liverpool JohnMoores University

Juergen Fliri, Ignacio TrujilloInsituto de Astrofísicade Canarias

Cláudio Filipe Vieira GomesCAUP, DFA-FCUP

Matthew HorrobinI. Physikalisches Institut,Universität zu Köln

Paula JofreInstitute of Astronomy,University of Cambridge

Nicolas LodieuInstituto de Astrofísica deCanarias (IAC, Tenerife)

Greg MadsenInstitute of Astronomy,University of Cambridge

Marc MoniezIN2P3-CNRS

Pierre OcvirkObservatoire Astronomiquede Strasbourg

Jean-Stephane RicolLPSC - IN2P3 CNRS

Kathy RomerUniversity of Sussex

Toni Santana-RosInstitute AstronomicalObservatory, Faculty of Physics,Adam Mickiewicz University

Dejan VinkovicScience and SocietySynergy Institute

Lukasz WyrzykowskiWarsaw UniversityAstronomical Observatory

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Monday 9 September 2013, 09:10 - 09:40Session 1 • LSST status and overview

Steven Kahn Stanford University/SLAC NationalAccelerator LaboratoryLSST Status and Overview

I will present an overview of the Large Syn-optic Survey Telescope, and of its develop-ment status in the United States. LSST was selected as the highest priority major new ground-based project in the 2010 decadal survey in astronomy and astrophysics con-ducted by the National Research Council. It is a large-aperture, wide-field telescope designed to survey the entire southern sky in six optical colors every few nights. The resulting database will enable a vast array of diverse scientific investigations ranging from studies of moving objects in the solar system to the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. LSST is being devel-oped as a joint interagency project by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science of the Department of Energy. It has been proposed as a “new start” in both agencies in the President’s budget proposal for 2014. The project has very broad-based support in the US community, and we are eager to engage international partners in the operation and scientific exploitation of this world-unique facility.

Monday 9 September 2013, 09:40 - 10:10 Session 1 • LSST status and overview

Zeljko Ivezic University of WashingtonLSST Science

TBC

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Monday 9 September 2013, 10:10 - 10:30Session 1 • LSST status and overview

Mario Juric LSSTEnabling LSST Science: LSST Data Products

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; http://lsst.org) is a planned, large-aperture, wide-field, ground-based telescope that will survey half the sky every few nights in six optical bands from 320 to 1050 nm. It will explore a wide range of astro-physical questions, from studies of the Solar Sys-tem, to examining the nature of dark energy. LSST is an integrated survey system. The Observatory, Telescope, Camera and Data Management sys-tems will be built to conduct the LSST survey and support no PI mode in the classical sense. Instead, the ultimate, science-enabling, deliverable of LSST will be the fully reduced data products.

There will be three main categories of LSST data products: “Level 1” products, designed to en-able detection and follow-up of optical transients, will be generated continuously every observing night. They will include alerts to objects that have changed brightness or position, and be broadcast world-wide. “Level 2” data products will be made available as annual Data Releases and will include well calibrated images and measurements of posi-tions, fluxes, and shapes. Their exact contents will be set by the desire to minimize the necessity to independently reprocess the image data. Finally, “Level 3” data products will be generated by LSST users, using LSST-provided software or computing services. Approximately 10% of LSST’s computing capability will be made available to the commu-nity for generation of Level 3 products. This capa-bility can be used to perform custom analyses not fully enabled by Level 1/2, while taking the advan-tage of co-location of computation with the entire LSST data set.

Monday 9 September 2013, 11:00 - 11:30 Session 2 • LSST Science Theme: Cosmology

Tony Tyson University of California, DavisLSST and the Physics of the Dark Universe

Recent advances in optics, detectors, and information technology, has led to the de-sign of a facility that will repeatedly image an unprecedented volume of the universe: LSST. For the first time, the sky will be sur-veyed wide, deep and fast. I will review the technology of LSST, and focus on several independent probes of the nature of dark energy and dark matter. These new investi-gations will rely on the statistical precision obtainable with billions of galaxies and the reduction of systematics from multiple inter-locking probes.

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Monday 9 September 2013, 11:30 - 12:00Session 2 • LSST Science Theme: Cosmology

Catherine HeymansInstitute for Astronomy, University of EdinburghObserving the Dark Universe

Dark Matter and Dark Energy constitute over 95% of the energy density of the Universe, and determining their nature is one of the major challenges for cosmology over the next decade. Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful technique that can map dark mat-ter structures from its gravitational effects alone and probe dark energy through its ef-fect on the growth of these structures. From an observational prospective, I will review the successes of this unique technique, pre-senting results from the recently completed Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). CFHTLenS probes dark matter in galaxy haloes and galaxy clusters and constrains cosmology through the de-tection of weak lensing by large-scale struc-tures. In combination with galaxy redshift surveys, CFHTLenS also provides a unique test for whether we need to go beyond Ein-stein with our current model of gravity.

Monday 9 September 2013, 12:00 - 12:30 Session 2 • LSST Science Theme : Cosmology

Sarah Bridle University of ManchesterAccurate Cosmology from LSST Cosmic Shear

I will summarise the biggest challenges for exploiting weak gravitational lensing as a probe of cosmology in the era of LSST: (i) high accuracy measurement of galaxy shapes (ii) intrinsic alignments of galaxies (iii) requirements on photometric redshifts (iv) requirements on simulations of the matter distribution.

I will describe existing research to address the challenges, including in DES, and discuss the prospects for LSST weak lensing.

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Bhuvnesh JainUniversity of PennsylvaniaNovel Probes of Gravity and Dark Energy

Cosmic acceleration is typically attributed to a smooth dark energy component in the universe. Alternative explanations are being worked out by theorists - unconventional forms of an energy component or modifica-tions to gravity. It will be exciting to test the various possibilities with LSST in conjunc-tion with other next generation surveys. The care and precision achieved with LSST in measurements of both cosmological and small scale structures will be essential to car-rying out these tests. I will describe the out-look for theoretical developments and next generation tests of gravity and dark energy.

Monday 9 September 2013, 14:30 - 15:00Session 3 • LSST Science Theme : Cosmology

Eiichiro KomatsuMax Planck Institute for AstrophysicsHobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will be the first, blind, spectroscopic survey of emission-line gal-axies. It will outfit 10-m Hobby-Eberly Tel-escope (HET) in McDonald Observatory in West Texas with a new, massive Integral Field Unit Spectrograph called VIRUS. We plan to have about 33k fibers filling 22 arc-minute field-of-view of the upgraded HET, which will be used for a blind spectroscopic survey of Lyman-alpha lines. The primary science goal of HETDEX is to detect and use about 800k Lyman-alpha-emitting galaxies to measure the angular diameter distances and expansion rates of the universe from z=1.9 to 3.5. We expect to detect the effect of dark energy on the expansion rate directly at z=2, even if dark energy is a cosmological constant. As such, HETDEX will test whether dark energy evolves with time with unprec-edented precision. In this talk, we describe the mission and expected outcome. The full HETDEX survey is expected to begin in 2014.

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Heather CampbellInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeCosmology with Photometrically - Classified Type Ia Supernovae

Future Supernovae (SN) surveys, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and Gaia, will be unable to spectroscopi-cally classify all the Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) that they are predicted to detect. The development of an efficient and robust photometric-classification system is thus essential. Here I present the cosmological analysis of 752 photometrically-classified SNe Ia obtained from the full Sloan Digital Sky Survey II (SDSS-II) Supernova Survey, supplemented with host-galaxy spectros-copy from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. This photometric-classification method is based on the SN classification technique of Sako et al., aided by host-galaxy redshifts (0.05 < z < 0.55). Su-perNova ANAlysis simulations of the meth-odology estimate that there is an SN Ia clas-sification efficiency of 70.8%, with only 3.9% contamination from core-collapse (non-Ia) SNe. I will demonstrate that this level of con-tamination has no effect on our cosmologi-cal constraints. We quantify and correct for our selection effects (e.g., Malmquist bias) using simulations.

Using a LambdaCDM cosmological model this sample provides competitive joint sta-tistical constraints on cosmological param-eters, comparable to those derived from the spectroscopically confirmed Three-year Su-pernova Legacy Survey (SNLS3). Using only our data, the statistics-only result favors an accelerating universe at 99.96% confidence. Assuming a constant wCDM cosmological model, we produce results that are competi-tive with similar spectroscopically confirmed SNe Ia analyses. Overall this comparison is reassuring, considering the lower redshift leverage of the SDSS-II SN sample (z < 0.55) and the lack of spectroscopic confirmation used herein. These results demonstrate the potential of photometrically classified SN Ia samples in improving cosmological con-straints.

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Bram VenemansMax Planck Institute for AstronomyQuasars in the Epoch of Reionisation:Results from LSST Precursors

Quasars are the brightest (non-transient) ob-jects observed at the highest redshifts, z>7. Such high redshift quasars are important as detailed analysis of quasar spectra provides unique information about the baryonic and physical condition of the Universe during the epoch of reionisation. Furthermore, the density of high redshift quasars puts power-ful constraints on the mechanisms that are required to seed and grow >109 Msun su-permassive black holes less than a Gyr after the Big Bang. Because these quasars are rare, surveys covering large areas on the sky are required to discover such objects. In this talk I will describe the results of our on-going programme aimed at discovering quasars at the highest redshifts in various optical and near-infrared surveys. In particular, I will dis-cuss our success in finding quasars using the Pan-STARRS1 survey, which is regarded as a precursor of the LSST, and detail how the LSST could make a significant contribution in this exciting field.

Monday 9 September 2013, 16:10 - 16:40Session 4 • Synergies – Euclid / eRosita, etc

Yannick MellierInstitut Astrophysique de Paris (IAP)Euclid

TBC

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Monday 9 September 2013, 16:40 - 17:10 Session 4 • Synergies – Euclid / eRosita, etc

Kirpal NandraMax Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics eROSITA

eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) is the core instrument on the Russian Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission, currently scheduled for launch in 2014. eROSITA will perform a deep survey of the entire X-ray sky. In the soft band (0.5-2 keV), it will be about 30 times more sensitive than ROSAT, while in the hard band (2-8 keV) it will pro-vide the first ever true imaging survey of the whole sky. The design driving science is the detection of large samples of galaxy clusters to redshifts z>1 in order to study the large scale structure in the Universe and test cos-mological models including Dark Energy. In addition, eROSITA is expected to yield a sam-ple of around 3 million AGN, including ob-scured objects, revolutionizing our view of the evolution of supermassive black holes. The survey will also provide new insights into a wide range of astrophysical phenome-na, including X-ray binaries, active stars and diffuse emission within the Galaxy.

Monday 9 September 2013, 17:10 - 17:30Session 4 • Synergies – Euclid / eRosita, etc

Manda BanerjiUniversity College LondonThe Dark Energy Survey: First Results

During fall 2012 the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration installed and commis-sioned DECam, a 570 mega-pixel optical and near-infrared camera with a large 3 sq. deg. field of view, set at the prime focus of the 4-meter Blanco telescope in CTIO, Chile. In the course of the next five years DECam will map an entire octant of the southern sky to unprecedented depth, measuring the posi-tion on the sky, redshift and shape of over 200 million galaxies, together with thou-sands of galaxy clusters and supernovae. With this data set, DES will study the proper-ties of dark energy using four main probes: galaxy clustering on large scales, weak gravi-tational lensing, galaxy-cluster abundance, and supernova distances.

A “Science Verification” (SV) period of ob-servations, lasting until late February 2013, followed the DECam commissioning phase, and provided science-quality images for over 150 sq. deg. at the nominal depth of the survey. The talk will present the first results from the SV observations, and will summa-rize the plans and goals for the upcoming years.

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Monday 9 September 2013, 17:30 - 17:50 Session 4 • Synergies – Euclid / eRosita, etc

Isobel HookUniversity of Oxford and INAF Obs. RomeHigh Redshift Supernovae with Euclid and LSST

We discuss advances in supernova cosmol-ogy that could be achieved by combining Euclid observations in the near-infrared with optical measurements from LSST. We show that if a suitable survey strategy can be im-plemented, six months of dedicated Euclid survey time would produce more than 1700 SNeIa in the range 0.75

M o n d a y 9 S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 3 , 1 7 : 5 0Session 4 • Synergies – Euclid / eRosita, etc

Roberto MignaniMullard Space Science Laboratory,University College LondonSynergies between LSST and the LargeObservatory for X-ray Timing (LOFT)

LOFT is a candidate ESA mid size mission candidate to be launched in the early 2020s. LOFT will carry aboard a Wide Field Monitor (WFM) that will observe simultaneously 1/3 of the sky in the 2-50 keV energy range. The WFM is an ideal instrument to look for and monitor hundreds of X-ray transients with a factor of 20 higher sensitivity than the All Sky Monitor Aboard the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. The detection of these transientswill trigger follow-up observations with the Large Area Detector (LAD), the other instru-ment aboard LOFT, to search for micro-varia-bility down to the ms-second time scales. In parallel, it will trigger follow-up observations with other motoring observing facilities op-erating at radio and optical wavelengths. In this talk I will introduce the LOFT mission and I describe the synergies with the LSST for the optical follow-up of X-ray transients.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013, 09:00 - 09:30Session 5 • LSST Science Theme : Nearby Universe + Milky Way

Vasily BelokurovInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeThe Milky Way

The Milky Way consists of the thin and the thick disks, the bulge and the halo. Or may-be it does not. In this talk we will briefly re-view the state of our ignorance and the re-cent advances in our understanding of the Galactic structure, chemistry and dynamics brought about by the information overload from wide-area sky surveys, precursors of the LSST. In particular, we will stop to con-template whether the bulge is really a disk. We will look in the current data to answer the following questions: is the thin disk sym-metric and does the thick disk actually exist? Finally, we will discuss how smooth the Gal-axy’s stellar halo appears to be.


Branimir SesarCalifornia Institute of TechnologyPicking Up the Pieces of the Broken Halo

Discovery and characterization of the faint-est Galactic halo substructures (bound or unbound), such as the ultra-faint dwarf sphe-roidal galaxies or their remnants, is one of the key science goals of the Milky Way and Local Volume component of LSST. Currently popu-lar techniques, such as the color-magnitude diagram filtering, will face a difficult challenge of detecting these low surface brightness structures in the ocean of foreground stars and unresolved background galaxies. I will present an end-to-end solution to the above problem which uses: 1) multi-epoch imaging to detect RR Lyrae stars and trace halo sub-structures, 2) low-resolution spectroscopy to infer kinematics and metallicity of detected substructures, 3) narrow-band and wide-area imaging to select giant stars associated with detected substructure, and 4) medium-reso-lution spectroscopy of distant giants to infer the star formation history of detected sub-structures. An application of this method will be illustrated on the Cancer moving groups, a halo substructure located 90 kpc from the Sun and covering 49 sq. deg. of sky. Based on the number of RR Lyrae stars in known ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies, this method will be able to trace even the faintest (M_V ~ 2 mag) ultra-faint galaxies up to 360 kpc from the Sun.

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Johan Knapen, S. Peters, P. van der Kruit,J. Fliri, I. Trujillo, M. CisternasInsituto de Astrofísica de CanariasDeep Imaging of Nearby Galaxies: UsingStrip82 to Train for LSST

Using careful stacking and co-adding of the different images comprising the Stripe82 dataset obtained as part of the Sloan Digi-tal Sky Survey, we produced images of over 100 nearby galaxies which are deeper by about 2 mag/arcsec^2 than normal SDSS images. These images allow us to study ra-dial disk profiles to a depth of some 30 mag/arcsec^2. In this talk, we present results on truncations in galaxies which are not very highly inclined, concluding that these are rare, and that previous claims of their occur-rence in the literature did not consider trun-cations but breaks at much higher surface brightness. We also discuss how our meth-ods can be used with LSST data, and what the advances and problems may be.


Victor DebattistaJeremiah Horrocks Institute, University ofCentral LancashireBulge Science with LSST

I will discuss some of the possible Milky Way science with LSST, in particular those relating to the bulge of the Milky Way.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013, 11:00 - 11:30 Session 6 • Synergies - Gaia

Timo PrustiESAThe Gaia Mission

Gaia is heading toward launch in November 2013. Spacecraft is ready and packed wait-ing for transportation to Kourou (in July the transport was expected for early Septem-ber). The latest news from the launch cam-paign will be provided. The scientific perfor-mance estimates will be presented in view of the latest test results and the scenario for intermediate data releases will be outlined.

Tuesday 10 September 2013, 11:30 - 12:00Session 6 • Synergies - Gaia

Annie RobinInstitut UTINAMSimulations for the Gaia Mission:Improving Galaxy Models

I shall present recent developments of Milky Way models for the sake of preparing simu-lations for the Gaia mission and for future interpretations of the final Gaia data. Vari-ous improvements of the Besancon galaxy Model will be presented, concerning the thick disc and halo, and a new scheme for analysing the star formation history of the Galactic disc.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013, 12:00 - 12:30 Session 6 • Synergies - Gaia

Wil O’MullaneEuropean Space Astronomy CentreBuilding the Gaia Ground Segment -What Did and Did Not Work

As we approach launch the Gaia ground seg-ment is ready to process a steady stream of complex data coming from Gaia at L2. This talk will focus on the software engineering aspects of the ground segment. Of course in a short talk it is difficult to cover every-thing but an attempt will be made to high-light some good things, like the Dictionary Tool and some things to be careful with like computer aided software engineering tools. The usefulness of some standards like ECSS will be touched upon. Testing is also cer-tainly part of this story as are Challenges or Rehearsals so they will not go without men-tion.

Tuesday 10 September 2013, 14:00 - 14:30Session 7 • LSST Science Theme : Nearby Universe & Techniques

Laurent EyerAstronomical Observatory, Geneva UniversityGaia Variables

TBC

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Rosanna SordoINAF - Padova ObservatoryThe Gaia astrophysical parametersinference system (Apsis)

TBC


Maria-Rosa CioniAIP / University of HertfordshireThe Magellanic Clouds : VISTA-VMC and LSST

The VISTA near-infrared YJKs ESO public sur-vey of the Magellanic Clouds system (VMC) is to-date more than 1/3 complete and sev-eral results have already been obtained. These studies confirm the superior quality of the data to meet the main objectives of deriving spatially resolved star formation histories and the 3D structure of the system as well as to contribute to a wealth of legacy science studies.

In this presentation I will briefly review the status of the VMC survey and then I will fo-cus on measurements of the proper motion of stellar populations across the Magellanic system. I will conclude by highlighting the impact of LSST observations on future inves-tigations of the Magellanic system and syn-ergies with VMC.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013, 15:20 - 15:40 Session 7 • LSST Science Theme : NearbyUniverse & Techniques

Daniel ZuckerMacquarie UniversityGALAH, Gaia and the Galaxy

The GALAH (GALactic Archaeology with HERMES) Survey is a major Australian-led project to obtain detailed elemental abun-dances for over a million stars, and apply the technique of chemical tagging -- iden-tifying chemically similar groups of stars in the Galactic disk, which presumably formed together -- to decipher the star formation, migration and minor-merger history of the Milky Way. HERMES, scheduled for commis-sioning in mid-2013, is a multi-fibre spectro-graph being built for the AAT 3.9m telescope at Siding Spring, designed to simultaneously obtain high resolution (R ~28000 or ~45000) spectra for ~400 stars over a 2° field of view. For the GALAH Survey, ~10^6 stars will be observed in four passbands selected to include elements from all major indepen-dently-varying element groups. Providing chemical abundances and precision radial velocities, GALAH will be directly comple-mentary to the astrometry, parallaxes and proper motions which will come from ESA’s Gaia mission. Beyond the GALAH survey, the HERMES instrument will offer a unique fol-lowup capability for targets selected from wide-area photometric surveys such as Sky-mapper and LSST.

Tuesday 10 September 2013, 16:10 - 16:40Session 8 • Synergies – Radio

Michael KramerMax Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy /Jodrell Bank Centre for AstrophysicsSignals in the Dynamic Radio Sky - from LOFARand Other Telescopes

LOFAR is a novel radio telescope operat-ing in Europe at low radio frequencies. Us-ing a sensitive core in the Netherlands and antenna stations distributed over baselines hundreds of km long, with “international” stations further away in Germany, France, Sweden and the UK, LOFAR simultaneously provide a large sensitivity, large spatial reso-lution and a large field-of-view. With Tran-sient Buffer Boards, it is also able to “play back time” for a few seconds to reobserve certain parts of the sky after the fact or the occurrence of trigger. These capabilities do not only offer unique scientific opportuni-ties for LOFAR alone, but also in synergy with other facilities like the LSST.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013, 16:40 - 17:00 Session 8 • Synergies – Radio

Michael BrownUniversity of ManchesterRadio-optical Weak Lensing Synergies withthe SKA and LSST Surveys

I will outline the prospects for performing weak lensing studies with a new generation of radio telescopes. I will particularly focus on the added value that radio weak lensing can offer above and beyond the convention-al optical-based approach. One particularly novel aspect that I will cover is the use of radio polarisation observations to remove contami-nation from intrinsic alignments. Moreover, there is a tremendous potential to mitigate against instrumental systematics through the joint analysis of overlapping radio and optical lensing surveys such as those which will be undertaken with the SKA and LSST telescopes. In the nearer term, the e-MERLIN instrument in the UK offers the unique combination of high sensitivity, wide field-of-view and sub-arcsec resolution required to prove lensing techniques in the radio band. I will describe the SuperCLASS survey - an e-MERLIN legacy programme to perform a pioneering radio weak lensing analysis of a supercluster of galaxies. The e-MERLIN observations for Su-perCLASS are now underway and we have ob-tained overlapping deep optical images of the field with the Suprime-Cam instrument on the Subaru telescope. I will summarize the current status of SuperCLASS, highlighting its role as a pathfinder experiment for joint lensing analy-ses of the future SKA and LSST survey data.

Tuesday 10 September 2013, 17:00 - 17:20 Session 8 • Synergies – Radio

Matt JarvisUniversity of Oxford & University ofthe Western CapeLSST and the SKA

I will discuss the key scientific aims of the deep continuum surveys that will be pos-sible with the SKA and its precursors. I will focus on two main aspects, the evolution of activity in the Universe and how we can use this information to obtain unique con-straints on the cosmological model and modified gravity theories, emphasising the role that a large scale optical survey con-ducted with the LSST could play in this area.

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Wednesday 11 September 2013, 09:00 - 09:30 Session 9 • LSST Science Theme : Galaxies and AGN

Guinevere KauffmannMax Planck Institute for AstrophysicsGalactic Accretion and the OuterStructure of Galaxies

We have combined the semi-analytic galaxy formation model of Guo et al. (2011) with the particle-tagging technique of Cooper et al. (2010) to predict galaxy surface brightness profiles in a representative sample of 1900 massive dark matter haloes from the Millen-nium II LCDM N-body simulation. Here we pre-sent our method and basic results focusing on the outer regions of galaxies consisting of stars accreted in mergers. These simulations cover scales from the stellar halos of Milky Way-like galaxies to the ‘cD envelopes’ of groups and clusters, and resolve low surface brightness substructure such as tidal streams. To test our model we have derived average stellar mass surface density profiles for massive galaxies at z=0.08 by stacking SDSS images. Our model agrees well with these stacked profiles and with other data from the literature, but can be more rigorously tested by future surveys such as LSST that extend the analysis of the outer structure of galaxies to fainter isophotes.


Ohad ShemmerUniversity of North TexasAGN Science with the LSST

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; http://lsst.org) will revolutionize our understand-ing of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and their envi-ronments. The decade-long survey will discover at least 10 million AGN across 18,000 square de-grees on the sky, with between about 50 to 200 visits per source for each of the ugrizy filters. A combination of the LSST sub-arcsecond astrom-etry, six-band photometry, and unprecedented cadence will enable the most efficient AGN selec-tion, with additional characterization through the use of sophisticated star-galaxy separation tech-niques. The time-domain nature of the survey will provide invaluable information on the physics of the AGN central engine, as well as on transient fuelling events, and will allow real-time alerts that will trigger follow-up observations. Several LSST “deep drilling” fields will help discover the faint-est AGN at high redshift, enhancing the value of current and planned multiwavelength pencil-beam surveys while providing hours-to-years temporal information on thousands of AGN. The wide ranges of both luminosity and redshift spanned by LSST, including the discovery of over 1000 quasars at z>6.5, will dramatically improve the quantification of the optical AGN luminos-ity function. Measurements of AGN clustering at high redshift will be used to determine the relationship between AGN and dark matter. The discovery of about 8000 gravitationally lensed quasars, including 1000 systems with measurable time delays, will place significantly tighter con-straints on key cosmological parameters.

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Wednesday 11 September 2013, 09:50 -10:10 Session 9 • LSST Science Theme : Galaxies and AGN

Alexandre Boucaud, James G. BartlettAPC, Paris Diderot UniversityWhat We Can / Can’t Do with CosmicNumber Magnification and LSST

Weak lensing shear is a very promising method to probe the distribution of mass in the universe, especially within a deep and wide survey like LSST. However, atmospheric turbulence limits the resolution of ground-based instruments and subjects shape measurements to systematic ef-fects that are difficult to manage. We are thus left with many well detected-sources for which we cannot measure the ellipticity. In addition to the image shearing, weak gravitational lensing also increases the size of the sources and, because their surface brightness is conserved, this results in an increased source flux that promotes other-wise undetected sources into the survey catalog. At the same time, the effective solid angle on the sky behind the lens is also increased, leading to a spatial dilution of sources. The competition be-tween the dilution and the source gain depends on the slope of the number counts of the back-ground population. It is a statistical effect, like that of shear, that we refer to as number magni-fication bias.

While shear has greater sensitivity than magni-fication at a given redshift, magnification could go well beyond the shear resolution limits in the case of LSST and probe much higher redshifts for “free”. We will present our magnification forecast-ing study for LSST, highlighting the main primary biases as well as the expected cosmological con-straint improvements to shear.


Henry FergusonSpace Telescope Science InstituteGalaxy Evolution – New Opportunities with LSST

TBC

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Isobel HookUniversity of OxfordSynergies Between LSST and the E-ELT

In the LSST era, extremely large telescopes will play a crucial role in both high resolution im-aging and primarily in spectroscopic follow-up of targets discovered in the LSST surveys that are too faint for follow-up with 8m-10m class facilities. In this talk, I will discuss the comple-mentarity and scientific synergies between the LSST and the E-ELT. I will report on the cur-rent status of the E-ELT project and outline the instrumentation plan. This will include how the capabilities of the foreseen instrument suite will address LSST and E-ELT science pri-orities. Scientific synergies for a broad range of science cases will be explored including tran-sients and dark energy.


Michal Chodorowski, B. Czerny,K. Hryniewicz, A. Świętoń, M. Krupa,M. Bilicki, A. PolloNicolaus Copernicus Astronomical CenterPhotometric Reverberation Study of Quasars and the Determination of Dark Energy from the LSST Data

High redshift quasars can be used as tracers of dark energy, much in the same way as SN Ia (Wat-son et al. 2011). Determination of each quasar’s absolute monochromatic luminosity can be done on the basis of the size of the Broad Line Region (BLR), which in turn can be determined from the measurement of the time delay between the line emission and the continuum. It is well known ob-servationally for nearby active galaxies that the BLR size and the monochromatic luminosity are very well correlated. This relation can be easily extended towards high redshift quasars since, as shown by Czerny & Hryniewicz (2011), the size of the BLR is determined by the conditions of dust formation in the accretion disk atmosphere. This method is currently being applied to spectro-scopic data. However, as argued by Chelouche & Daniel (2012), photometric data can also be used for the time delay measurement, under the condition of the appropriate assessment of the continuum and the line contributions to specific photometric channels. We perform simulations to show the expected accuracy of the method, when applied to many measurements expected from LSST.

References: Chelouche & Daniel ApJ, 747, 62 (2012) Edri et al. ApJ...756...73 (2012) Watson D. et al., ApJ, 740, L49 (2011)

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Doron CheloucheUniversity of HaifaPhotometric Reverberation Mappingof Quasars with LSST

The concept of broadband photometric rever-beration mapping (PRM) of quasar interiors (e.g., of the broad line region, BLR) is intro-duced. Using detailed multiband light curve simulations, which take into account up-to-date LSST characteristics, it is shown that the BLR size of prominent emission lines will be measured in numerous z<2 quasars over the survey’s lifetime. The most promising broad emission line’s size-luminosity-redshift rela-tions, to be quantified by the LSST (e.g., those of the Balmer, MgII, CIII], and CIV lines), are pre-sented. Automatization of the PRM process formillions of quasars is discussed, and the re-quired tests to assess the validity of the solu-tions are highlighted. As BLR size measure-ments are crucial for reliable black hole (BH) mass determination, and since current rever-beration samples are limited to a few dozens of nearby sources, LSST may have far-reaching implications for understanding the inner-workings of quasar engines and BH demogra-phy over cosmic time.

Wednesday 11 September 2013, 14:00 - 14:30 Session 11 • Spectroscopic Followup

Roelof de JongLeibniz-Institut für Astrophysik, Potsdam (AIP)4MOST - 4-metre Multi-Object SpectroscopicTelescope

4MOST is a wide-field, multi-object spectro-scopic survey facilityunder development for the 4m-class VISTA telescope of ESO. 4MOST will run near permanently on the telescope to perform a 5 year public survey scanning a large fraction of the southern hemisphere yielding more than 20 million spectra at resolution R~5000 (λ=390–1000 nm) and more than 2 million spectra at R~20,000 (395–456.5 nm & 587–673 nm). The 4MOST design is especially intended to comple-ment three key all-sky, space-based obser-vatories of prime European interest: Gaia, eROSITA and Euclid. Synergies with LSST will be discussed, in particular the feasibility of transients follow-up. The 4MOST consor-tium aims to deliver the full 4MOST facility by mid-2019 and start delivering high-level data products for both consortium and ESOcommunity targets a year later with yearly increments.

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Wednesday 11 September 2013, 14:30 -14:50 Session 11 • Spectroscopic Followup

Michele CirasuoloRoyal Observatory EdinburghMOONS: a New Multi-objectSpectrograph for the VLT

I will present a science and technical over-view of MOONS, a new Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph, selected by ESO as a third generation instrument for the Very Large Telescope, to be operational in 2018.

The grasp of the 8.2m VLT combined with the high multiplex and wide wavelength coverage of MOONS will provide the astronomical com-munity with a powerful, world-leading instru-ment able to serve a wide range of Galactic, Extragalactic and Cosmological studies.

I will highlight the synergies with LSST and how MOONS will be able to provide the deep spectroscopic follow-up, essential to determine chemical abundance measure-ments of stars in the Milky Way as well as to derive the evolution of galaxies and struc-ture over >12 billion years of the history of the Universe. I will present the main science cases, the surveys envisaged and the overall technical design.

Wednesday 11 September 2013, 14:50 - 15:10 Session 11 • Spectroscopic Followup

Karin LindInstitute of Astronomy,University of CambridgeGaia - ESO Survey

The Gaia-ESO survey is a public spectroscop-ic survey running on FLAMES/VLT. Over five years of survey time, almost one hundred thousand stars will be observed in all main components of the Milky-Way. The detailed chemistry of the targets, in particular when coupled with spatial and kinematic infor-mation from Gaia, will revolutionise our un-derstanding of Galaxy formation and stellar evolution. I will discuss early science results, some of the challenges all large-scale spec-troscopic surveys are faced with, and how LSST will help.

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Wednesday 11 September 2013, 15:10 -15:30 Session 11 • Spectroscopic Followup

Chris CopperwheatAstrophysics Research Institute,Liverpool John Moores UniversityLiverpool Telescope 2 and LSST

The Liverpool Telescope is a fully automated robotic telescope owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University and based on La Palma. We are currently conducting a feasibility study for a 4m class successor telescope to come into operation at the be-ginning of the next decade. This new facility will be dedicated to time domain astrophys-ics, with a particular emphasis on transients, particularly supernovae ad gamma-ray bursts. LSST will report huge numbers of transients every night and follow-up obser-vations from other telescopes, particularly spectroscopic observations, will be vital in order to fulfil the scientific potential of the project. The flexibility and rapid response of a dedicated robotic telescope makes it ideal for this purpose. Our concept is for an agile, fast slewing facility which will be able to catch the rapidly fading emission from ex-otic transients such as the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources. In this talk I hope to demonstrate that LT2 will be a powerful tool for European science exploitation of LSST outputs.

Thursday 12 September 2013, 09:00 - 09:30Session 13 • LSST Science Theme :Solar System

François MignardObservatoire de la Côte d’AzurSolar System Science in the Era of LSST

LSST will enter into survey mode just after Gaia ends its observing mission and pub-lished its final catalogue. Both programs rely on a gigapixel camera and aim at regular re-turns to the same regions of the sky to carry out a deep survey of the variable sky. In both proposals solar system science belongs to the core science goals and impacts on the design.

In this talk I will consider in a general way the current major solar system science issues that can be answered by an all-sky survey with re-peated observations combining astrometry and photometry in several wide bands. Then I will draw a picture of the expected situation when Gaia results are published around 2021 at the time of LSST enters into science opera-tion, stressing the big step forward promised by Gaia together with its own limitations in magnitude and time coverage. A new era will begin with the LSST abilities to go much fainter allowing the detection of smallest near-earth objects (100 m in diameter vs. 2 km) and to extend the survey in the distant and elusive Kuiper Belt, hardly touched by Gaia. I will show few examples of the ques-tions that will be addressed by the LSST in these two areas.

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Karri MuinonenDepartment of Physics, Universityof Helsinki & Finnish Geodetic InstituteThe Asteroid Challenge for LSST

An overview will be given on the research of asteroids in the context of large-scale surveys such as LSST. The overview will start from the statistical inversion of astrometric observations for the orbital-element prob-ability density functions (p.d.f.’s), followed by inversion of photometric observations for rotation-period and pole-orientation p.d.f.’s. as well as inversion for convex shape mod-els. The overview will end at statistical inver-sion of spectrometric, photometric, and po-larimetric observations for asteroid surface properties. On the course of the overview, asteroid research with the Gaia mission is compared to asteroid research with LSST.

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So far only one minimoon has ever been de-tected, the few-meter diameter 2006 RH120. The most likely explanations for the lack of minimoon discoveries are that observers have not realized that they exist and/or that minimoons are too challenging to be de-tected and tracked with current sky surveys. Optical detection of minimoons requires a system which provides a wide coverage, high sensitivity and short exposure time to mitigate trailing losses. Preliminary results from a detectability analysis suggest that the current sky surveys are on the brink of detecting minimoons on a regular basis (Bolin et al., in preparation). The anticipated performance of the LSST hardware gives it the potential to become the leading discov-erer of minimoons and we predict that it will detect one new minimoon every month. The challenge with LSST is to make sure that the LSST Moving Object Processing Sys-tem (LSST MOPS) correctly links tracklets of minimoons and thus allows the discovery of these objects. In particular, it may be prefer-able to link pairs of fast-moving moderate-signal-to-noise tracklet pairs rather than triplets of the same, because minimoons are only detectable for a fraction of the time that they are captured and waiting for a week or so to collect three tracklets may substan-tially reduce the number of discoveries. We will present the detectability analysis and discuss the remaining challenges related to minimoons and LSST MOPS.

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Mikael Granvik (1), Bryce Bolin (2), Robert Jedicke (2), Grigori, Fedorets (1)(1) University of Helsinki, (2) University of HawaiiDetectability of Earth’s Temporary Natural Satellites with LSST

It has recently been shown that the Earth is surrounded by a cloud of small natural sat-ellites (Granvik et al. 2012, Icarus 218, 262). These so-called minimoons are temporarily captured by the Earth-Moon system from the much larger population of near-Earth objects (NEOs). A minimoon is typically captured for about nine months and makes about three revolutions around the Earth during this period. The largest minimoon captured at any given time is about one meter in diameter but there are, e.g., 1000 minimoons larger than 10 centimeters in di-ameter orbiting the Earth at any given time. Larger objects are also captured but these captures occur less frequently. The scientific interest towards minimoons is threefold: (i) they provide a test of the NEO population statistics in a size range that is not well-sampled by contemporary asteroid surveys, (ii) they provide an opportunity for detailed studies of small asteroids in a size-range that is relevant for asteroid return missions but challenging to observe extensively during Earth flybys and, finally, (iii) they are attrac-tive targets for asteroid return missions due to their small size and ultra-low requirement on the delta v.

Thursday 12 September 2013, 10:50 -11:20 Session 14 • Big Data : Big Science

Rob FenderUniversity of Southampton/University of OxfordRadio Transients and their Optical Counterparts

In this talk I will discuss the field of radio transients, and the wide range of astrophysi-cal phenomena it encompasses, presenting new results from LOFAR and other next-gen-eration radio telescopes. I will furthermore discuss the optical counterparts of radio transients, and how coordinated radio and optical observations, ultimately culminating in joint SKA-LSST programmes, will maxim-ise our scientific return on variable and tran-sient sources.

Thursday 12 September 2013, 11:20 -11:50Session 14 • Big Data : Big Science

Andy ConnollyUniversity of WashingtonChallenges in the Big Data Analysis

Astronomy and astrophysics are witness-ing dramatic increases in data volume as detectors, telescopes, and computers be-come ever more powerful. During the last decade, sky surveys across the electromag-netic spectrum have collected hundreds of terabytes of astronomical data for hundreds of millions of sources. Over the next decade, the data volume will enter the petabyte do-main, and provide accurate measurements for billions of sources. I will discuss some of practical data analysis and interpretation challenges that we will be facing as a com-munity. I will also discuss how we could train the next generation of astronomers and physicists to confront these new challenges in computational and data-enabled science and engineering.

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Thursday 12 September 2013, 11:50 -12:10 Session 14 • Big Data : Big Science

Nicholas WaltonInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeThe Gaia Data Archive, Science Driven Data Access

The Gaia satellite will be launched before the end of 2013 - its data will underpin advances in many areas of astrophysics in the coming decade. The Gaia data analysis consortium is now defining, developing and preparing to operate the Gaia data access system - to ensure the effective delivery of the various large and complex data products from Gaia - ready for the release of the first all sky cata-logues in 2015.

This paper considers the processes which have been employed to define the data ac-cess system, with the specific focus on en-suring that functionality is developed to meet clearly defined scientific need. Thus, the process of capturing requirements form the community is described, noting how the high priority cases were identified. A specific item is the development of the access sys-tem able to not only deliver the Gaia science data, but also to act as a dynamic and living archive, which can absorb added value sci-entific knowledge contributed by the sci-ence users of the original data, making this then available for re-use.

This paper will cover the current science de-sign of the archive and note relevance to the case of LSST in the 2020 decade.

Thursday 12 September 2013, 12:10 -12:30Session 14 • Big Data : Big Science

Jorge Sanchez AlmeidaInstituto de Astrofísica de CanariasAutomated Unsupervised Search for UnusualObjects in Large Databases - the LSST Perspective

Rare objects are often extremely telling from a physical point of view. They are part of the large astronomical databases, although their identifica-tion is not trivial. Any systematic search for such objects rely on some kind of classification of the full database, so that rare objects stick out as out-liers of the classes. Obviously, the classification of large datasets must to be automated. We have been exploring k-means as a tool for automated unsupervised astronomical classification, and its efficiency and robustness makes the algorithm ideal for realistically large datasets (e.g., to classify all the SDSS spectra at once; Sanchez Almeida et al. 2010, 2013a). In particular, k-means allowed us to select a new set of extremely metal poor (XMP) galaxies (Morales-Luis et al. 2011), very unusual in the local Universe (only 0.1% of the galaxies), but undergoing physical processes common in the early universe and impossible to study in detail at high-z. For example, XMPs seem to portray the growth of a galaxy disk by accretion of pristine gas (Sanchez Almeida et al. 2013b). I will use the iden-tification and characterization of XMP galaxies to emphasize the importance of identifying unusual objects, and to illustrate the use of k-means in this process. Then I will argue how the same tools allow to data-mine the huge databases to be provided by LSST, which all the possibilities that this offers.

Refs:Morales-Luis et al. 2011, ApJ, 743, 77Sanchez Almeida et al., 2010, ApJ, 714, 487Sanchez Almeida et al., 2013a, ApJ, 763, 50Sanchez Almeida et al. 2013b, ApJ, 767, 74

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Thursday 12 September 2013, 13:45 -14:15 Session 15 • LSST Science Theme : Transients

Suvi GezariUniversity of MarylandTransient Science with LSST

LSST will transform the study of extragalac-tic transient sources with time domain ob-servations over a wider area and to a more sensitive depth than ever before. I will over-view the exciting possibilities with LSST for studying known transients (supernovae, tidal disruption events, AGN outbursts), as well as for uncovering populations of exotic transients (orphan afterglows, pair-instabili-ty supernovae, unknown unknowns). While LSST will act as the discovery engine, paral-lel multiwavelength imaging and follow-up spectroscopy will be critical for studying the physical processes powering the transients, probing their environments, and making connections to their host galaxy properties. I will conclude with possible strategies for how the community can prepare in advance to optimize transient science with LSST.


Stephen SmarttQueen’s University BelfastSupernova and Transient Science with LSST

The currently functioning suite of 1-2m tel-escopes with 8-10 sq degree cameras are providing a wealth of new information on supernovae and optical transients. I will use the results and experience of these (particu-larly Pan-STARRS1 and PESSTO) to discuss the science opportunities and unique ca-pabilities of LSST and what we have learned from recent efforts.

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Simon HodgkinInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeTransients with Gaia

Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) as-trometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia’s main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper-motions) for the brightest 1 billion objects in the sky. These data, complemented with multi-band, multi-epoch photometric and spectroscopic data collected from the same observing platform, will allow astronomers to reconstruct the formation history, struc-ture, and evolution of the Galaxy.

Gaia will observe the whole sky for 5 years, providing a unique opportunity for the dis-covery of large numbers of transient and anomalous events, e.g.supernovae, novae and microlensing events, GRB afterglows, Fallback Supernovae, and other theoreti-cal or unexpected phenomena. The Photo-metric Science Alerts team has been tasked with the early detection, classification and prompt release of anomalous sources in the Gaia data stream. We discuss the challenges we face in preparing to use Gaia to detect and classify transient phenomena at optical wavelengths in the context of LSST.


Vladimir LipunovMoscow State UniversityGlobal MASTER-Net : PromptFollow-up GRB and Synoptic Survey

The Global MASTER-Net developed as the universal system which simultaneously pre-sents fast reactive follow-up color and po-larization system and fast synoptic survey up to 19-20 mag.

More than 100 alerts pointings at GRBs were made from January 2011 through July 2013. Currently more than half of prompt point-ings at GRBs by ground telescopes are made by the MASTER network.

More than 340 bright optical transients have been discovered during synoptic survey: supernovae (neutron stars and black holes formation and search of dark energy), dwarf novae, novae (thermonuclear burning on white dwarfs in binary systems and accre-tion process), quasar and blazar activities (luminous of relativistic plasma near super massive black holes) and other short-time living objects available for optical observa-tions.

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Thursday 12 September 2013, 15:40 -16:10 Session 16 • Transient Followup

Samaya NissankeCalifornia Institute of TechnologySearching for Electromagnetic Counterpartsof Gravitational Wave Mergers

Joint gravitational-wave (GW) and multi wavelength electromagnetic (EM) obser-vations of compact binary mergers should enable unprecedented studies of astro-physics in strong-field gravity, and of binary stellar evolution. Within the next decade, a worldwide network of advanced versions of ground-based GW interferometers should become operational from 10 Hz to a few kHz. At these frequencies, inspirals and mergers of neutron star binary mergers are expected to be amongst the most numer-ous and strongest GW-emitting sources. A subset of these events could be associated with a transient EM counterpart, and should be observable at different wavelengths, en-ergies and timescales. In this talk, I discuss how we can search and identify such EM counterparts using LSST.

Thursday 12 September 2013, 16:10-16:40 Session 16 • Transient Followup

Lucianne WalkowiczPrinceton UniversityTransient & Variable Followup Science with LSST

The Global MASTER-Net developed as the universal system which simultaneously pre-sents fast reactive follow-up color and po-larization system and fast synoptic survey up to 19-20 mag.

More than 100 alerts pointings at GRBs were made from January 2011 through July 2013. Currently more than half of prompt point-ings at GRBs by ground telescopes are made by the MASTER network.

More than 340 bright optical transients have been discovered during synoptic survey: supernovae (neutron stars and black holes formation and search of dark energy), dwarf novae, novae (thermonuclear burning on white dwarfs in binary systems and accre-tion process), quasar and blazar activities (luminous of relativistic plasma near super massive black holes) and other short-time living objects available for optical observa-tions.

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POSTER ABSTRACTS • A - Z

Marc BetouleLPNHE CNRSCosmological Constraints from SNLS/SDSS:Pushing Down the Systematics

We present recent progress in cosmologi-cal constraints from the type Ia supernovae Hubble diagram which results mainly from significant improvements of the SNLS and SDSS surveys photometric calibration accu-racy. The high statistics gathered in recent SN-Ia surveys, combined with a sub-percent accuracy in the relative flux calibration, al-lows us to map the variations of the luminos-ity distance as a function of z with a relative precision of about 3% in logarithmic redshift bins \delta z/z \sim 0.5 between to z=0.02 and z=0.7. This approach is, today, the most sensitive probe of Dark Energy. Combining with the recent CMB measurement from Planck, we obtain an accuracy better than 6% on the equation of state parameter w.


Nadejda BlagorodnovaInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeCharacterising Nearby Transients from Gaia

Gaia is an ESA cornerstone space astrometric mission. The launch of the satellite devoted to survey 10**9 stars from nearby Universe will be launch almost at the same time of the LSST conference.

In this poster we present the technique used to characterise transients detected by Gaia by using its low-resolution spectra. Both Blue and Red spectrophotometers on board will provide valuable information on the wide spectral features of the point-like sources detected by the satellite. The current work uses this data to identify the transient type, its redshift and epoch of explosion, in case of long-lasting events. The poster de-scribes the base of the Bayesian approach chosen, the assembling process of the semi-empirical training set and the performance achieved by using this method.

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Hervé BouyCenter for Astrobiology - CSICComplementing Gaia from the Groundand Preparing for LSST

The DANCe project is a wide field ground-based survey of young nearby associations and clusters meant to prepare and comple-ment the Gaia mission and LSST survey.

Taking advantage of the numerous wide field public archives, we derive precise proper motions and multi-wavelength pho-tometry over several tens of square degrees in young (<600Myr) nearby (<500pc) asso-ciations. Our new advanced data processing and astrometric pipelines allow us to reach an accuracy of 0.3 mas/yr (best case) up to i~23mag, thus ~4 mag deeper than Gaia, and comparable to the expected LSST accu-racy and sensitivity. To analyse the million-source catalogues produced by DANCe, we are also developing novel statistical meth-ods based on advanced multi-dimensional probabilistic analysis to derive reliable mem-bership probabilities.

An optimized (in a statistical sense) set of pa-rameters is chosen among all unique combi-nations of available colors and magnitudes and proper motions, simultaneously. The calculation takes into account measurement uncertainties on both the photometry and proper motion, as well as censored data. This is particularly important since the various datasets combined in our study have very different coverages and depths. In the case of the Pleiades cluster, the method leads to approx. 1500 high confidence (probabil-ity>99%) members, or twice the most recent census (dated 2012).

The experience acquired with the DANCe project, both for the astrometric and sub-se-quent scientific analysis, could be very valu-able for the future LSST survey.

Our website: http://www.laeff.cab.inta-csic.es/projects/dance/main/

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Chris DavisLiverpool Telescope / Liverpool John Moores UniversityTime Domain Astronomy withthe Liverpool Telescope

A brief overview of the Liverpool Telescope, Europe’s premier robotic observatory, will be presented. The LT specializes in deliver-ing high-impact results in time-domain as-trophysics, and is the largest facility of its kind in the world. The LT offers a range of optical instrumentation that includes imag-ing, spectroscopy, and polarimetery, and will shortly commission a new near-IR camera. In the run-up to LSST operations in the next decade, support for the LT (and it successor, LT2), is vital if the UK is to maintain its lead-ership role in rapid-response and transient astronomy.

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Juergen Fliri, Ignacio TrujilloInsituto de Astrofísica de CanariasThe IAC Stripe 82 Legacy Project

An almost unexplored branch of the physics that the LSST will fully open is the one con-nected with the extremely low surface bright-ness Astronomy. With its unique combination of depth and area the LSST survey will allow us to investigate with unprecedented depth and statistics topics like very low surface bright-ness galaxies, the abundance of faint satellite galaxies, the number of diffuse stellar streams around nearby objects, the intra-cluster light in several thousands of nearby galaxy clusters, the extend, structure and color of the outer disks of spiral galaxies, etc. In this contribution, we want to present the state-of-the-art situation in this field of the Astronomy. In particular, we will show our work on producing optimal coadds of the 5-band (u,g,r,i,z) SDSS Stripe 82 data in a total area of ~275 square degrees, reaching 1.7 magnitudes deeper than the SDSS single ep-och data releases and showing surface bright-ness features down to 29 mag/arcsec^2. We will show the science that can be conducted with this survey, the technical difficulties associated to this type of work unveiling such extremely low surface brightness details and how the experience gained by our team can be used as preparatory survey for the science which will be explored by the LSST, especially within its planned Deep Drilling mini-survey.

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Cláudio Filipe Vieira GomesCAUP, DFA-FCUPThe Layzer-Irvine Equation andCosmic Structure Formation

In this presentation we shall discuss a gener-alized Layzer-Irvine equationwhich can de-scribe the gravitational collapse of cold dark matter in a dark energy background. We will show that the usual form of the Layzer-Irvineequation is valid if the dark matter is mini-mally coupled to an omogeneous dark en-ergy distribution, regardless of its equation of state. We will further show that the correc-tions to the standard Layzer-Irvine equation are expected to be small, even in the pres-ence of dark energy inhomogeneities, if the dark energy has a constant equation of stateparameter consistent with the latest obser-vational constraints. Finally, we shall dem-onstrate that, in more general models, the impact of dark energy perturbations on the dynamics of clusters of galaxies might be significant.

arXiv:1305.6064


Matthew HorrobinI. Physikalisches Institut, Universität zu KölnSerendipitous Surveys with theE-ELT, Synergies with LSST

We present the potential capabilities of a serendipitous survey instrument for the E-ELT, and discuss its compelling synergies with the LSST science programme.

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Paula JofreInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeBinding Stellar Surveys with Benchmark Stars

In the current era of big stellar surveys to study our Galaxy, star count analyses need to have a clear set of standard reference stars. Up to know, spectroscopic surveys have only considered the Sun.

We have defined a set of benchmark stars of different spectral types, have built spectral libraries and have determined their funda-mental stellar parameters. Although the di-rect application for such a set is for Gaia and the Gaia-ESO Survey, it should be used to calibrate other big surveys in order to con-nect consistently the different ways to study the stars and our Galaxy.

I introduce in this talk the Gaia benchmark stars with their library spectra. I further pre-sent how we obtain their fundamental pa-rameters.

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Nicolas LodieuInstituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Tenerife)The Photometric and Astrometric MassFunctions in Galactic Open Clusters

The latest release of the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) Galactic Clusters Sur-vey (GCS) made public near-infrared pho-tometry in six passbands (ZYJHK1K2) and accurate proper motions measured from the multiple epochs of observations obtained as part of the GCS. The main scientific goal of the UKIDSS GCS is to investigate the shape and universality of the Initial Mass Function (Salpeter 1955) in the low-mass and substel-lar regimes. We analysed the photometric and astrometric data in four galactic regions which harbour the largest mean proper mo-tions (between approximately 27 to 50 mas/yr) among the 10 regions surveyed by the GCS: Upper Scorpius (age=5 Myr, d=145pc; Lodieu et al. 2007, 2008, 2013), Alpha Per (85 Myr, 170 pc; Lodieu et al. 2012b), the Pleia-des (125 Myr, 120 pc; Lodieu et al. 2012), and Praesepe (590 Myr, 182 pc; Boudreault et al. 2012). We selected photometrically and astrometrically hundreds of cluster mem-ber candidates in these four regions in an homogeneous manner based on their posi-tions in colour-magnitude and vector point-diagrams.

We have also analysed the photometric data for another two regions where the GCS-based astrometry is not available, sig-ma Orionis (3-5 Myr, 352 pc; Lodieu et al. 2009) and IC4665 (27 Myr, 350 pc; Lodieu et al. 2011). The cluster sequences are well-defined in colour-magnitude diagrams and the members stand out in the proper mo-tion diagrams. We derived the luminosity and mass functions for all these regions, us-ing the latest state-of-the-art isochrones to convert magnitudes into masses. We find that all mass functions are very similar in the 0.6-0.03 Msun mass interval and in agree-ment with the log-normal form of the field mass function by Chabrier (2005), pointing towards a universal mass function.

This talk will focus on several key results ob-tained from our homogeneousstudy:

1) comparison of the mass functions in the low-mass and substellar regimes2) comparison of the cluster sequences with the “old” NextGen+DUSTY models (Baraffe et al. 1998; Chabrier et al. 2000) and the most recent BT-Settl models (Allard et al. 2012) from the Lyon group3) comparison of the photometric binary fractions in the low-mass and brown dwarf regimes with the latest hydrodynamical simulations of Bate (2012)4) discussion on the K-band variability of 5, 85, 120, and 600 Myr low-mass stars and brown dwarfs5) preliminary optical spectroscopy will also be presented.

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Greg MadsenInstitute of Astronomy, University of CambridgeData Mining the OpticallyVariable Sky since 1950

The next generation surveys of the time variable sky will have unprecedented sensi-tivity and areal coverage, but will be limited in their ability to detect variability on time scales longer than the lifetime of the sur-veys. We present a new precision, multi-ep-och photometric catalog that spans 60 years by combining the USNO-B and SDSS DR9 catalogs. We recalibrate the photometry of the original USNO-B catalog and create a catalog with two epochs of photometry in up to five different bands for ~ 44 million optical point sources that lie in the DR9 foot-print of the northern sky. The recalibrated objects span a magnitude range 14 < m < 20 and are accurate to ≈ 0.1 mag. We minimize the presence of spurious objects and those with inaccurate magnitudes by identifying and removing several sources of systematic errors in the two originating catalogs, with a focus on spurious objects that exhibit large apparent magnitude variations. After ac-counting for these effects, we find 250,000 stars and quasars that show significant (>4σ) changes in brightness between the USNO-B and SDSS DR9 epochs. We discuss the histor-ical value of the catalog and its application to the study of long time-scale, large ampli-tude variable stars and quasars.


Marc MoniezIN2P3-CNRSSub-minute Variability: Search for Hidden Turbulent Gas through Interstellar Scintillation with LSST

We propose a new way to search for (hidden) cool molecular hydrogen H2 in the Galaxy through diffractive and refractive effects: Stars twinkle because their light crosses the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is ex-pected on a longer time scale when the light of a remote star crosses an interstellar turbu-lent molecular cloud, but it has never been observed at optical wavelengths. Our simu-lations and test observations show that in favourable cases, the light of a background star can be subject to stochastic fluctuations on the order of a few percent at a character-istic time scale of a few minutes. I will discuss the unique potential of the LSST movie-mode to search and study such inter-stellar scintillation due to turbulent clouds through highly sampled light-curves. Since scintillation is expected to be a rare process (optical depth < 10-3) and needs highly sam-pled light curves of small apparent size stars (i.e. faint stars), the--wide, deep and fast-- LSST is the ideal device for this science.

I will show that a modest amount of a few nights of observation time with LSST can significantly constrain the last unknown baryonic contribution to the Galactic mass.

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Pierre OcvirkObservatoire Astronomique de StrasbourgInvestigating the ReionizationHistory of the Local Group with LSSTLow-mass Satellite Galaxies

The UV background pervading the Universe during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) has been proposed as a solution to the miss-ing satellite problem. The radiation field is responsible for evaporating the gas of the lowest-mass galaxies as early as z=6, pre-venting or stopping their star formation. The apparent low efficiency of star formation in low mass satellites populations, in particular the ultra-faint dwarfs of the Milky Way, can be interpreted as the result of this process. These are often regarded as fossils of the EoR. LSST, by discovering more and fainter such objects, will allow us to investigate the reionization history of the Local Group. When did it happen? What was the major UV source responsible for the photo-evapora-tion of the ultra-faint dwarfs? Was it Virgo? The progenitor of M31? The Milky Way itself?

In order to interpret the upcoming LSST data, we need to produce reliable observ-able predictions for satellite populations, which is the topic of this talk. I will present the efforts or our group to model the sat-ellite population of the Milky Way and its reionization in 3 increasing levels of realism.

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Semi-analytical models are fast but unable to account for the spatially complex and rapidly evolving UV background during the EoR. This is why we turned to radiative trans-fer post-processing of CLUES simulations (Constrained Local Universe Simulations), and I will use them to demonstrate how the reionization scenario can affect the proper-ties of the satellite population.

Finally, I will show the first results of our large (40 million hours) coupled hydro-radi-ative simulation of the formation of the local group on the titan supercomputer, which fo-cuses on the effects of radiative feedback on satellites galaxies.

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Jean-Stephane RicolLPSC - IN2P3 CNRSPhotoZ Reconstruction : New Methodto Reject Outliers and Improve PhotoZ Quality

LSST will observe several billions of galaxies and constrain Dark Energy parameters with an un-equalled precision. Photometric redshift (PhotoZ) reconstruction is a key in LSST success and will need a high accuracy in order to reach science goals.

We developed a new PhotoZ method whose main originality consists in using reconstructed param-eter posterior distribution to reject outliers. We start from a realistic simulated catalog of billions of galaxies, including Λ-CDM standard cosmology, Dahlen luminosity functions, a template library of 51 spectra interpolated from 6 main types (El, Sbc, Sbd, Irr, SB1, SB2), dust reddening, intergalactic me-dium absorption and LSST throughputs and mag-nitude error. Our whole simulation chain has been validated by comparing our outputs with CFHTLS and GOODS data.

After redshift reconstruction using template fitting method, we can use a subsample of the catalog for which we know (or assume we’ll know) the redshift from spectroscopic data and use it to train a statisti-cal test on good and outliers galaxies. This gives us a very powerful tool to reject outliers in the rest of the catalog and thus improve significantly PhotoZ quality.

I will present the ingredients of our simulation, ex-plain the statistical test method and show the per-formances we obtain.


Kathy RomerUniversity of SussexXMM Clusters through DECam Eyes

X-ray clusters will play an important role in DES and LSST cosmology, because they allow us to calibrate the mass-observable relation for the (vastly dominant, in terms of numbers) optically selected clusters. More than 600 X-ray cluster candidates have been identified using the XMM public archive within the footprint of the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification (DES-SV) region, i.e. areas on the sky that were imaged by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam, Honscheid et al. 2012) during the 2012/2013 observing season at CTIO. The X-ray candi-dates were selected using techniques devel-oped for the XMM Cluster Survey (Romer et al. 2001; Lloyd-Davies et al. 2011; Mehrtens et al. 2012). Using data processed using the DES Data Management pipelines (DESDM, Mohr et al. 2012), we have derived photometric red-shifts using the red sequence technique (Song et al. 2012). We present: 1. examples of our re-duction of XMM mosaic fields in the DES-SV re-gion; 2. summary information about the XCS-DES-SV clusters; and 3. multi-colour DECam images of a selection of XCS-DES-SV clusters. Our results with DES-SV give a flavour for what will be possible with LSST with regard to X-ray selected clusters.

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Toni Santana-RosInstitute Astronomical Observatory,Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz UniversityAsteroid Photometric Sparse DataSimulations: Synchronous Binary AsteroidsImpact to Sparse Data Inversion

Introduction: The oncoming photometric surveys that will provide in a near future a huge amount of high-precision sparse data for asteroids (Pan-STARRS, Gaia, LSST) urges us to be ready to process big sets of data, but also to build a robust classifier in order to avoid retrieving incorrectly their physical parameters. In this work, we focused on the impact of the synchronous binary systems in the inversion of a sparse photometry simu-lated dataset. Its conclusions may help on the discovering of new multiple asteroid sys-tems and their first simple characterization. Procedure: We generated various sets of sparse photometry observations using triax-ial ellipsoid shapes either as a single body or as a synchronous binary system (Fig.1), in all their possible geometric axis orientations. To generate the epochs of the observations we used the ephemeris software devel-oped in the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur. It is also important to be aware of the size of such data sets. As an example the ESA’s mission Gaia is expected to observe more than 400.000 small Solar System bodies [1], thus it is essential to use a reasonably simple inversion method to reduce as possible the CPU time needed.

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We decided to use the genetic code build for single bodies inversion that is using also triaxial ellipsoid shapes [2] and we looked for any impact traces that the binarity could have on the inversion. Initial results: We de-termined that the inversion of the sparse photometry simulations of a synchronous system using an inversion software de-signed to deal with a single body do affect the body shape determination (as expected) but is not having a major impact on the period searching nor the retrieving of the asteroid spin axis orientation, being the dif-ference between the real and the obtained orientation lesser than 5 degrees (Fig.2). This is a positive result, as we can take profit of the pole orientation values determined by this fast inversion to speed-up the potential multiplicity searching, using a small range of angles around the solution found. Our near future work will thus be focused on building a sparse-data inversion algorithm based on the presented conclusions.

References: [1] Delbo, M. et al. (2012)Planetary and Space Science, vol. 73, Issue 1, p. 86-94. [2] Mignard, F. et al. (2007) Earth, Moon, and Planets, vol. 101, Issue 3-4, pp. 97-125.

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Dejan VinkovicScience and Society Synergy InstituteMeteor Science with Survey Telescopes -the Case of SDSS Meteors

Meteors are transient events that have a large angular size and random positions on the sky. This makes them unsuitable for in-vestigations with typical telescopes, where they are unwanted noise on astronomical images. But meteors might become an in-teresting science topic for wide-field survey telescopes, which have a long enough time coverage over a significant fraction of the sky to collect a scientifically relevant sam-ple of low-brightness meteors. This has a relevance in discussions about the meteor population index in the tail of the size distri-bution, the meteor radiant structure, meteor defragmentation and the microstructure of light curves (especially when a meteor is de-tected through several color filters, as it hap-pened in SDSS). We ran a custom designed script for detection of linear features in SDSS images and detected numerous streaks. The drift scan in imaging survey mode of SDSS enables simple distinction between meteors and other linear transients such as space de-bris and satellites. We present the detection method and some interesting preliminary results of the analysis of detected meteors. Implications for LSST and other surveys are discussed.

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Lukasz Wyrzykowski (1,2),Alicja Rynkiewicz (1),Szymon Kozlowski (1),Andy Gould (3)(1) Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory(2) Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge(3) Department of Astronomy, Ohio State UniversityMicrolensing with the OGLE and LSST

Gravitational microlensing in the Milky Way is a powerful tool for studying the dark mat-ter, the structure of the Galaxy and for de-tection of Earth-like distant planets. By their nature, microlensing events occur mainly in the most crowded regions of the sky, namely the Galactic bulge, disk, towards the Magel-lanic Clouds and M31.

For more than 20 years the OGLE surveys regularly monitors the most dense areas of the southern sky, handling the issue of the crowded data with the state-of-the-art Dif-ference Imaging Analysis method. The time-domain photometric data obtained with that method are of excellent quality as for 1.3m telescope, and have provided about 200,000 variable stars down to 21 mag in I-band and thousands of microlensing events.

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We present some highlights from the recent results obtained by the OGLE project in the domain of microlensing: discoveries of plan-ets, non-detection of MACHOs as the main component of the Milky Way dark matter halo and detection of the central Galactic bar with the largest homogenous sample of 3600 microlensing events.

We also discuss similarities and analogies between the OGLE survey and the LSST, emphasising the potential scientific break-throughs yet to be achieved in the domain of microlensing.

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