Groot, Paul J. and Bloemen, S. and Vreeswijk, P. and van Roestel, J. and Jonker, P. G. and Nelemans, G. and Klein-Wolt, M. and Poole, R. Le and Pieterse, D. and Rodenhuis, M. and Boland, W. and Haverkorn, M. and Aerts, C. and Bakker, R. and Balster, H. and Bekema, M. and Dijkstra, E. and Dolron, P. and Elswijk, E. and van Elteren, A. and Engels, A. and Fokker, M. and de Haan, M. and Hahn, F. and Horst, R. ter and Lesman, D. and Kragt, J. and Morren, J. and Nillissen, H. and Pessemier, W. and de Rijke, A and Raskin, G. and Scheers, L. H. A. and Schuil, M. and Timmer, S. T. and Arcavi, I. and Blagorodnova, N. and Biswas, S. and Breton, R. and Dawson, H. and Dayal, P. and Wet, S. De and Duffy, C. and Faris, S. and Fausnaugh, M. and Gal-Yam, A. and Geier, S. and Horesh, A. and Johnston, C. and Wijnands, R. A. D. and Modiano, D. (2024) The BlackGEM telescope array I: Overview. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 136 (11): 115003. ISSN 0004-6280
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The main science aim of the BlackGEM array is to detect optical counterparts to gravitational wave mergers. Additionally, the array will perform a set of synoptic surveys to detect Local Universe transients and short time-scale variability in stars and binaries, as well as a six-filter all-sky survey down to ~22nd mag. The BlackGEM Phase-I array consists of three optical wide-field unit telescopes. Each unit uses an f/5.5 modified Dall-Kirkham (Harmer-Wynne) design with a triplet corrector lens, and a 65cm primary mirror, coupled with a 110Mpix CCD detector, that provides an instantaneous field-of-view of 2.7~square degrees, sampled at 0.564\arcsec/pixel. The total field-of-view for the array is 8.2 square degrees. Each telescope is equipped with a six-slot filter wheel containing an optimised Sloan set (BG-u, BG-g, BG-r, BG-i, BG-z) and a wider-band 440-720 nm (BG-q) filter. Each unit telescope is independent from the others. Cloud-based data processing is done in real time, and includes a transient-detection routine as well as a full-source optimal-photometry module. BlackGEM has been installed at the ESO La Silla observatory as of October 2019. After a prolonged COVID-19 hiatus, science operations started on April 1, 2023 and will run for five years. Aside from its core scientific program, BlackGEM will give rise to a multitude of additional science cases in multi-colour time-domain astronomy, to the benefit of a variety of topics in astrophysics, such as infant supernovae, luminous red novae, asteroseismology of post-main-sequence objects, (ultracompact) binary stars, and the relation between gravitational wave counterparts and other classes of transients