FYST: The Telescope Built to Measure the Unknown
Cornell’s FYST project is redefining what’s possible in submillimeter astronomy, pairing extreme engineering with frontier science. Built for wide-field, ultra-sensitive sky surveys from one of the driest, highest sites on Earth, FYST is engineered to capture light from the earliest moments of the universe—revealing how the first galaxies formed and probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Graduate students to seasoned engineers are pushing cryogenics, instrumentation, and measurement precision to new limits to deliver a telescope capable of science that simply couldn’t be done before. For the test & measurement community, FYST is a showcase of bold design, meticulous calibration, and the power of building the tools that unlock entirely new physics.
Transcript
00:00:02 Astronomers need telescopes in order to explore the universe. Ultimately, I think many people doing astronomy are driven by curiosity, big questions like, how did we get here? What's out there? How does the universe work? FYST, is going to be the most sensitive submillimeter telescope that's ever been built. if we could figure out a way to build a telescope like FYST, we would be able to do science that could not be done
00:00:33 until we built that telescope. What FYST is designed to do is to make legacy surveys which address questions about what happened in the very early universe, how the first star forming galaxies formed and lit up the universe, and that goes all the way through cosmic time. So this is FYST This is a 100 to 1 scale model. We collect the light from the early universe and all kinds of sources that will really enable this wide range of measurements and new understanding of cosmology and our universe. The the types of telescopes that we have,
00:01:26 they're really designed to look at a very small, very, very small, part of the sky in a huge amount of detail. But for, sort of exploratory work, you don't know where to look excatly. And so you actually want something that can see a lot of the sky at a given time. And so telescopes like FYST are really uniquely well-suited to, to doing that. Chile is one of the best, if not the best sites on Earth for making, these submillimeter measurements. we're going up to 18,500 ft. and this is one of the driest sites on Earth. So there's very little water vapor in the sky.
00:02:19 I am the principal investigator of the Prime-Cam instrument you see here, as well as the Mod-Cam instrument that will deploy on FYST. And it's been built largely with graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and undergraduates. I, I'd never really done any kind of research before. I'd only really done experiments in class. And so actually getting to do something that was real and actually had impact on society was actually really cool. The research here is first class. my role is I develop and design the cryogenics of Prime-Cam
00:02:54 and Mod-Cam, it's very fulfilling to know that my work plays a small part but important part in a much larger collaboration. there's not a lot of places in the world where you can work on such a impactful project to science. In 1994, a group from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory wanted to go look at possible telescope sites in Chile. They asked our late colleague Riccardo Giovanelli if he would go along with them because he spoke Spanish. And he came back and said we should do this because we could do this.
00:03:42 We know how to build telescopes. And it's why we at Cornell, I think, have been involved in it because we had the capability, we had the experience, and we also had the dream. Fred Young is a dedicated Cornell alumnus, He loves Cornell. He also has a tremendous passion for cosmology and science in general. He was very helpful in advising us or critiquing what we were doing in a constructive way. because he's an engineer.
00:04:14 He can ask tough questions. Questions that I probably couldn't ask. It's quite special to have a telescope that's really being built, in large part by your department. A lot of astronomy nowadays is done with major international observatories that you are very unlikely to ever visit. We can understand how the universe is evolving by making better measurements of these galaxy clusters and how they move relative to each other. There's 95% of the universe we don't understand. this so-called dark energy and dark matter, FYST could rule out different possible theories for what these may be. An advanced,
00:04:56 intelligent civilization should try to explore the unknown. And that's what we're trying to do. We're going to answer some fundamental questions in both astrophysics and cosmology that no one's answered before.