(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capabi
lity in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $delta<+34.5^circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $rsim27.5$. The remaining 10% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.
We discuss the synergy of Gaia and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in the context of Milky Way studies. LSST can be thought of as Gaias deep complement because the two surveys will deliver trigonometric parallax, proper-motion, and photome
tric measurements with similar uncertainties at Gaias faint end at $r=20$, and LSST will extend these measurements to a limit about five magnitudes fainter. We also point out that users of Gaia data will have developed data analysis skills required to benefit from LSST data, and provide detailed information about how international participants can join LSST.
A damped random walk is a stochastic process, defined by an exponential covariance matrix that behaves as a random walk for short time scales and asymptotically achieves a finite variability amplitude at long time scales. Over the last few years, it
has been demonstrated, mostly but not exclusively using SDSS data, that a damped random walk model provides a satisfactory statistical description of observed quasar variability in the optical wavelength range, for rest-frame timescales from 5 days to 2000 days. The best-fit characteristic timescale and asymptotic variability amplitude scale with the luminosity, black hole mass, and rest wavelength, and appear independent of redshift. In addition to providing insights into the physics of quasar variability, the best-fit model parameters can be used to efficiently separate quasars from stars in imaging surveys with adequate long-term multi-epoch data, such as expected from LSST.
Over the last decade, quasar sample sizes have increased from several thousand to several hundred thousand, thanks mostly to SDSS imaging and spectroscopic surveys. LSST, the next-generation optical imaging survey, will provide hundreds of detections
per object for a sample of more than ten million quasars with redshifts of up to about seven. We briefly review optical quasar selection techniques, with emphasis on methods based on colors, variability properties and astrometric behavior.
Studies of stellar populations, understood to mean collections of stars with common spatial, kinematic, chemical, and/or age distributions, have been reinvigorated during the last decade by the advent of large-area sky surveys such as SDSS, 2MASS, RA
VE, and others. We review recent analyses of these data that, together with theoretical and modeling advances, are revolutionizing our understanding of the nature of the Milky Way, and galaxy formation and evolution in general. The formation of galaxies like the Milky Way was long thought to be a steady process leading to a smooth distribution of stars. However, the abundance of substructure in the multi-dimensional space of various observables, such as position, kinematics, and metallicity, is by now proven beyond doubt, and demonstrates the importance of mergers in the growth of galaxies. Unlike smooth models that involve simple components, the new data reviewed here clearly show many irregular structures, such as the Sagittarius dwarf tidal stream and the Virgo and Pisces overdensities in the halo, and the Monoceros stream closer to the Galactic plane. These recent developments have made it clear that the Milky Way is a complex and dynamical structure, one that is still being shaped by the merging of neighboring smaller galaxies. We also briefly discuss the next generation of wide-field sky surveys, such as SkyMapper, Pan-STARRS, Gaia and LSST, which will improve measurement precision manyfold, and comprise billions of individual stars. The ultimate goal, development of a coherent and detailed story of the assembly and evolutionary history of the Milky Way and other large spirals like it, now appears well within reach.
We compare observations of AGB stars and predictions of the Elitzur & Ivezic (2001) steady-state radiatively driven dusty wind model. The model results are described by a set of similarity functions of a single independent variable, and imply general
scaling relations among the system parameters. We find that the model properly reproduces various correlations among the observed quantities and demonstrate that dust drift through the gas has a major impact on the structure of most winds. From data for nearby oxygen-rich and carbon-rich mass-losing stars we find that (1) the dispersion in grain properties within each group is rather small; (2) both the dust cross-section per gas particle and the dust-to-gas mass ratio are similar for the two samples even though the stellar atmospheres and grain properties are very different; (3) the dust abundance in both outflows is significantly below the Galactic average, indicating that most of the Galactic dust is not stardust - contrary to popular belief, but in support of Draine (2009). Our model results can be easily applied to recent massive data sets, such as the Spitzer SAGE survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud, and incorporated in galaxy evolution models.
The data obtained by the recent modern sky surveys enable detailed studies of the stellar distribution in the multi-dimensional space spanned by spatial coordinates, velocity and metallicity, from the solar neighborhood all the way out to the outer M
ilky Way halo. While these results represent exciting observational breakthroughs, their interpretation is not simple. For example, traditional decomposition of the thin and thick disks predicts a strong correlation in metallicity and kinematics at $sim$1 kpc from the Galactic plane; however, recent SDSS--based work has demonstrated an absence of this correlation for disk stars. Instead, the variation of the metallicity and rotational velocity distributions can be modeled using non--Gaussian functions that retain their shapes and only shift as the distance from the mid--plane increases. To fully contextualize these recent observational results, a detailed comparison with sophisticated numerical models is necessary. Modern simulations have sufficient resolution and physical detail to study the formation of stellar disks and spheroids over a large baseline of masses and cosmic ages. We discuss preliminary comparisons of various observed maps and N--body model predictions and find them encouraging. In particular, the N--body disk models of Rov{s}kar et al. cite{Roskar 2008} reproduce a change of disk scale height reminiscent of thin/thick disk decomposition, as well as metallicity and rotational velocity gradients, while not inducing a correlation of the latter two quantities, in qualitative agreement with SDSS observations.
Significant progress in the description of quasar variability has been recently made by employing SDSS and POSS data. Common to most studies is a fundamental assumption that photometric observations at two epochs for a large number of quasars will re
veal the same statistical properties as well-sampled light curves for individual objects. We critically test this assumption using light curves for a sample of $sim$2,600 spectroscopically confirmed quasars observed about 50 times on average over 8 years by the SDSS stripe 82 survey. We find that the dependence of the mean structure function computed for individual quasars on luminosity, rest-frame wavelength and time is qualitatively and quantitatively similar to the behavior of the structure function derived from two-epoch observations of a much larger sample. We also reproduce the result that the variability properties of radio and X-ray selected subsamples are different. However, the scatter of the variability structure function for fixed values of luminosity, rest-frame wavelength and time is similar to the scatter induced by the variance of these quantities in the analyzed sample. Hence, our results suggest that, although the statistical properties of quasar variability inferred using two-epoch data capture some underlying physics, there is significant additional information that can be extracted from well-sampled light curves for individual objects.
