November 25, 2015

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, now owned and operated by the East Asian Core Observatories Association (EACOA) has recently announced its large legacy programs it will embark on between the end of 2015 to January of 2019, dedicating half of the observatory's time and resources through several collaborative large projects. Two of these projects focus on observations of the COSMOS field.

The first is the S2-COSMOS survey, a 223 hour program seeking to complete deep 850um mapping of the entire 2 square degree field. This will enable the direct detection of ~1000 submillimeter galaxies down to a flux limit of ~4.5mJy (4 sigma). The S2-COSMOS survey is being coordinated by Ran Wang, Scott Chapman, Yuichi Matsuda, Yujin Yang, Ian Smail, and Wei-Hao Wang.

The second survey focused on COSMOS is the STUDIES survey, or the SCUBA-2 Ultra Deep Imaging EAO Survey. This is a 330 hour deep pointing focusing on the high angular resolution capability of 450um imaging in superb weather. The goal of STUDIES is to detect typical galaxies in their dust emission in the early Universe and understand the full origins of the far-IR extragalactic background light. STUDIES will achieve a 0.57mJy RMS map at 450um (confusion-limited) in the CANDELS-imaged portion of COSMOS, already covered by HST with a substantial amount of multiwavelength data and spectroscopy. This will be the deepest submillimeter map ever taken at 450um. This project is being coordinated by Scott Chapman, Xianzhong Zheng, Hyunjin Shim, Tadayuki Kodama, Ian Smail and Wei-Hao Wang (PI).

COSMOS team members who are an EAO member partner or in an EAO region (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or select universities in the UK or Canada) are encouraged to participate in the JCMT legacy programs. This is great news for COSMOS, and will certainly establish the field as the leading submillimeter extragalactic survey field for years to come. Find out more here.