Copperwheat, C. M.; Steele, I. A.; Barnsley, R. M.; Bates, S. D.; Bersier, D.; Bode, M. F.; Carter, D.; Clay, N. R.; Collins, C. A.; Darnley, M. J.; Davis, C. J.; Gutierrez, C. M.; Harman, D. J.; James, P. A.; Knapen, J. H.; Kobayashi, S.; Marchant, J. M.; Mazzali, P. A.; Mottram, C. J.; Mundell, C. G.; Newsam, A.; Oscoz, A.; Palle, E.; Piascik, A.; Rebolo, R.; Smith, R. J.
Bibliographical reference
Experimental Astronomy, Volume 39, Issue 1, pp.119-165
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3
2015
Journal
Citations
13
Refereed citations
5
Description
The Liverpool Telescope is one of the world's premier facilities for
time domain astronomy. The time domain landscape is set to radically
change in the coming decade, with synoptic all-sky surveys such as LSST
providing huge numbers of transient detections on a nightly basis;
transient detections across the electromagnetic spectrum from other
major facilities such as SVOM, SKA and CTA; and the era of
`multi-messenger astronomy', wherein astrophysical events are detected
via non-electromagnetic means, such as neutrino or gravitational wave
emission. We describe here our plans for the Liverpool Telescope 2: a
new robotic telescope designed to capitalise on this new era of time
domain astronomy. LT2 will be a 4-metre class facility co-located with
the Liverpool Telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos
on the Canary island of La Palma. The telescope will be designed for
extremely rapid response: the aim is that the telescope will take data
within 30 seconds of the receipt of a trigger from another facility. The
motivation for this is twofold: firstly it will make it a world-leading
facility for the study of fast fading transients and explosive phenomena
discovered at early times. Secondly, it will enable large-scale
programmes of low-to-intermediate resolution spectral classification of
transients to be performed with great efficiency. In the target-rich
environment of the LSST era, minimising acquisition overheads will be
key to maximising the science gains from any follow-up programme. The
telescope will have a diverse instrument suite which is simultaneously
mounted for automatic changes, but it is envisaged that the primary
instrument will be an intermediate resolution, optical/infrared
spectrograph for scientific exploitation of transients discovered with
the next generation of synoptic survey facilities. In this paper we
outline the core science drivers for the telescope, and the requirements
for the optical and mechanical design.
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