Friday, October 09, 2026 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

Gaurav Waratkar, Caltech

"Cryoscope: Surveying the infrared time-domain sky from Antarctica"

Abstract:

The next decade of time-domain astronomy will be shaped by what we can see in the infrared. GW170817 showed us a kilonova from a binary neutron star merger, but neutron star–black hole mergers are predicted to be even more lanthanide-rich. The heavy r-process elements synthesized in these mergers have high optical opacity and shift the kilonova glow into the near-infrared, where it also persists for much longer. Existing IR space telescopes have narrow fields of view and cost billions, and ground-based IR observatories are drowned in thermal emission from warm optics and a warm sky. Cryoscope will be a 1.2 m, 50 sq. deg. survey telescope operating in the K-dark window (2.35 - 2.55 micron) at Dome C, Antarctica, with the entire optical path cryogenically cooled. By pushing the dominant noise term down to the uniquely low Antarctic sky background, Cryoscope reaches volumetric survey speeds that match or exceed Rubin, Roman, and SPHEREx in a wavelength regime where the obscured universe becomes visible for compact binary mergers, exoplanets around cool stars, dust-reddened transients, and more. In this talk, I will walk through these science cases with a focus on mergers, and then turn to the fifth-scale Pathfinder our team shipped to Dome C in September 2026, the technical challenges we worked through to get it on the ice, and finally the science it will enable in its first observing season.

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