Yesterday morning, April 19th, the primary mirror ‘M1’ has successfully been lifted and installed in the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope.
The FYST is part of the CCAT observatory located in the Atacama desert in Chile close to the ALMA array. It is the world’s highest telescope and the University of Cologne and Bonn played a crucial role in building it!
The telescope was build jointly by Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), a German consortium consisting of the Universities of Cologne and Bonn as well as the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and a Canadian consortium of eight universities
The CHAI (CCAT Heterodyne Array Instument) receiver was developed at the UoC by the team of Dr. Urs Graf. It allows for efficient large-scale mapping through its 64-pixel array simultaneously observing the sky.
The FYST enables a variety of science projects such as observing the Cosmic Microwave Background, measuring the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect of galaxy clusters, tracing the first star-forming galaxies, and studying the ISM in different environments in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.
Photo credit: https://www.ccatobservatory.org/
Sources:
https://astro.uni-koeln.de/graf/chai
https://www.ccatobservatory.org/science/
https://www.ccatobservatory.org/
