Speaker
Description
Current single-dish sub-mm facilities have opened new views of some of the brightest celestial sources, and interferometers have provided the exquisite resolution necessary to analyse the details in small fields. Answering questions with current generation facilities is creating the next generation questions. To go further, what we need is a facility capable of rapidly mapping large portions of the sky both spatially and spectrally, but also repeatedly. The Atacama Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (AtLAST) aims to be a sustainable, upgradeable, multipurpose facility that will deliver orders of magnitude increases in sensitivity and mapping speeds over current and planned sub-mm telescopes. With its 50m dish and large field of view, the strength of AtLAST is in science where a large field of view, highly multiplexed instrumentation and sensitivity to faint large-scale structure is important: from the gas and dust that fills and surrounds galaxies to our own Solar System. In this talk, I will present an overview of some of the dust focused science that AtLAST will be able to deliver.
