APEX – the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment: 10 Years of Exploring the Southern Submillimeter Skies

by Prof. Karl Menten (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie)

Tuesday 20 Sept 2016, 16:15 → 17:15 Europe/Berlin

Auditorium (MPI fuer Physik)

Since 10 years, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment Project (APEX) has been operating a 12 m diameter telescope on a 5100 meter altitude site in the Chilean Atacama desert. A collaboration between the Max-Planck-Society, ESO and the Swedish Onsala Space Observatory, APEX has opened the southern skies for submillimeter wavelength astronomy, centering on dust and molecules throughout the Universe. APEX has made a series of exciting, unexpected discoveries. Large surveys of dust emission over the whole southern galactic plane and deep observations of cosmological Deep Fields have provided unbiased views of star formation in the Milky Way and at high redshift. In comprehensive follow up programs with APEX itself, but also with other observatories and at other wavelengths, the nature of the sources found in these surveys is investigated. A continuous line of state of the art, highly innovative detectors developed and built by the MPI for Radio Astronomy, Chalmers University and other institutions gives APEX full coverage of all the submillimeter windows accessible from the ground for spectroscopy and matchless wide area imaging capability for continuum radiation that will soon be expanded enormously. APEX has been a pathfinder not only for the recently completed Atacama Large submillimeter/ Millimeter Array (ALMA), but also for Herschel and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). After an overview of the APEX project, key science results will be presented with an emphasis on these synergies. An overview of the detector technology will also been given. Moreover, the (at first look) maybe surprizing complementarity between submillimeter and very high energy gamma ray (THz and TeV) astronomy will be touched on.