Speaker
Description
This will be a talk in two parts.
In the first part I will given an overview of the European Southern Observatory, its capabilities (VLT, ALMA, VLTI, La Sila) and current developments, including the construction of the Extremely Large Telescope where The Netherlands plays an important role, among others through the METIS, Micado and MOSAIC instruments.
In the second part I will give an overview of the Time Domain Telescope, an initiative in the context of ESO's Broadening Horizons program to identify the next big project, in the 2040s, after the ELT. The Time Domain Telescope (TDT) is envisioned to be a fully flexible spectroscopic optical-infrared facility consisting of 100+, individually steerable, unit telescope of each ~2 meter diameter, which provide fully AO-corrected image quality at the 0.1" level in the optical, and which are coupled by fibers to a smaller set of spectrographs at low, medium and high resolution. Users will have the freedom to schedule a single unit telescope, multiple unit telescopes or the full array for their targets, which specifically include time-critical observations of transients (GW sources, GRBs, Supernovae, XC-ray transients), eclipsing systems, and/or variables, but can also be extremely faint steady sources. With its AO-assisted spatial resolution the TDT, when equipped with 100 units of 2 meters, obtains the equivalent sensitivity in the background-limited regime of a monolithic 200m telescope operating in natural seeing (1"). "The Time Domain Telescope: spectra when you need them. Anywhere, anytime."
| Talk category | Plenary |
|---|---|
| Second preference | Splinter 1: Large Infrastructure and instrumentation |
| PhD relevance | N/A |
