The design of GNAO is optimized for a broad range of science cases that will allow for major synergies with the James Webb Space Telescope and Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) as well as other recent and upcoming facilities like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Euclid. The example science highlighted below is a joint summary of the science cases developed for GNAO and its primary science instrument GIRMOS.
As a queue-operated wide-field AO facility, GNAO will be a premier facility for follow-up observations of transient and multi-messenger sources. Compared to seeing-limited follow-up campaigns, GNAO’s high angular resolution offers key advantages for:
A particular strength of GNAO will be the ability to rapidly follow-up transient alerts from Rubin Observatory’s LSST with greater flexibility than space telescopes. In addition to the primary rapid-response mode offered through the GIRMOS imager, the GIRMOS spectrograph will be available for spectroscopic time domain studies.
GNAO’s primary science instrument GIRMOS will use the GNAO-compensated science beam for multiplexed spectroscopy through up to four deployable integral field units (IFUs). GIRMOS offers a multi-IFU mode with additional Multi-Object AO (MOAO) correction within a 2-arcmin diameter probe field or a tiled-IFU mode using the GNAO narrow-field AO compensation. Key science cases for these modes include surveys of high-redshift galaxies and globular clusters, respectively. These surveys will provide unprecedented sample sizes of spatially-resolved morphology and kinematic data for galaxies around redshift 2 (the “cosmic noon”) and key opportunities to search for the putative intermediate-mass black holes hosted in globular clusters.
GNAO offers a broad range of capabilities for solar system, Galactic, or extragalactic studies. The key capabilities are
Apart from the scientific opportunities described in the previous sections, example GNAO+GIRMOS science cases include