Sciences with the 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST)
Creators: name: WFST Collaboration
name: Wang, Tinggui
name: Liu, Guilin
name: Cai, Zhenyi
name: Geng, Jinjun
name: Fang, Min
name: He, Haoning
name: Jiang, Ji-an
name: Jiang, Ning
name: Kong, Xu
name: Li, Bin
name: Li, Ye
name: Luo, Wentao
name: Pan, Zhizheng
name: Wu, Xuefeng
name: Yang, Ji
name: Yu, Jiming
name: Zheng, Xianzhong
name: Zhu, Qingfeng
name: Cai, Yi-Fu
name: Chen, Yuanyuan
name: Chen, Zhiwei
name: Dai, Zigao
name: Fan, Lulu
name: Fan, Yizhong
name: Fang, Wenjuan
name: He, Zhicheng
name: Hu, Lei
name: Hu, Maokai
name: Jin, Zhiping
name: Jiang, Zhibo
name: Li, Guoliang
name: Li, Fan
name: Li, Xuzhi
name: Liang, Runduo
name: Lin, Zheyu
name: Liu, Qingzhong
name: Liu, Wenhao
name: Liu, Zhengyan
name: Liu, Wei
name: Liu, Yao
name: Lou, Zheng
name: Qu, Han
name: Sheng, Zhenfeng
name: Shi, Jianchun
name: Shu, Yiping
name: Su, Zhenbo
name: Sun, Tianrui
name: Wang, Hongchi
name: Wang, Huiyuan
name: Wang, Jian
name: Wang, Junxian
name: Wei, Daming
name: Wei, Junjie
name: Xue, Yongquan
name: Yan, Jingzhi
name: Yang, Chao
name: Yuan, Ye
name: Yuan, Yefei
name: Zhang, Hongxin
name: Zhang, Miaomiao
name: Zhao, Haibin
name: Zhao, Wen
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
subject: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
subject: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
subject: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is a dedicated photometric surveying facility being built jointly by the University of Science and Technology of China and the Purple Mountain Observatory. It is equipped with a 2.5-meter diameter primary mirror, an active optics system, and a mosaic CCD camera with 0.73 gigapixels on the primary focal plane for high-quality image capture over an FOV of 6.5-square-degree. It is anticipated that WFST will be set up at the Lenghu site in the summer of 2023 and begin to observe the northern sky in four optical bands (u, g, r, and i) with a range of cadences, from hourly/daily in the Deep High-Cadence Survey (DHS) program to semiweekly in the Wide-Field Survey (WFS) program, three months later. During a photometric night, a nominal 30 s exposure in the WFS program will reach a depth of 22.27, 23.32, 22.84, and 22.31 (AB magnitudes) in these four bands, respectively, allowing for the detection of a tremendous amount of transients in the low-z universe and a systematic investigation of the variability of Galactic and extragalactic objects. In the DHS program, intranight 90 s exposures as deep as 23 (u) and 24 mag (g), in combination with target of opportunity follow-ups, will provide a unique opportunity to explore energetic transients in demand for high sensitivities, including the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events, supernovae within a few hours of their explosions, tidal disruption events and fast, luminous optical transients even beyond a redshift of unity. In addition, the final 6-year co-added images, anticipated to reach g=25.8 mag in WFS or 1.5 mags deeper in DHS, will be of fundamental importance to general Galactic and extragalactic science. The highly uniform legacy surveys of WFST will serve as an indispensable complement to those of LSST that monitor the southern sky.
description: 48 pages