Collaborative Research: The Condor Array Telescope Survey of the Sky

A research collaboration between the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the American Museum of Natural History has been operating the Condor Array Telescope at a very dark astronomical site in the southwest corner of New Mexico since 2021. With renewed NSF support, the team will add two new telescopes to the instrument, significantly enhancing its capabilities. They will continue to operate Condor to obtain, analyze, and interpret a variety of observations spanning the entire northern sky, focusing on several important science topics to which the instruments can make particularly significant contributions. In addition, the team will produce a one-hour-long video documentary featuring Condor New Mexico and the rich cultural history of the North American civilizations in the region. This film will explore the interaction between scientific inquiry and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on the Apache people, whose ancestors have lived in the region for centuries. The team will also incorporate their survey images into a Hayden Planetarium space show tentatively titled “Multi-Messenger Astrophysics.” Condor combines six off-the-shelf refracting telescopes with six off-the-shelf CMOS cameras. It is optimized for low-surface-brightness sensitivity, wide field of view, and rapid time resolution. The instruments will detect and study large portions of the extremely faint and extremely distant filaments of the “cosmic web” of intergalactic gas that stretches between the galaxies, seeking to understand how the largest-scale structures of the Universe form and evolve over time; image the sky in eight of the most important emission lines of astrophysics, making the resulting survey immediately available as a community resource; observe the rapidly-evolving afterglows of gamma-ray bursts within the first seconds following their discovery, providing a direct window into the mechanisms driving the most energetic explosions known; and monitor the entire stellar bulge of the Milky Way at a rapid 20-second cadence, searching for low-mass planets, moons, asteroids, and more toward the center of our Galaxy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.