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Summary: Looking Deep from the South Pole: Star
Formation in the Thermal Infrared
Michael G.Burton, John W.V.Storey and Michael C.B.Ashley
Joint Australian Centre for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica,
School of Physics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Abstract. 1
The Antarctic Plateau provides the pre-eminent conditions on the Earth for wide-
eld imaging at thermal infrared wavelengths. We describe a project to equip the 60cm
SPIREX telescope at the South Pole with a large format (1024 1024) IR array camera
(Abu) to demonstrate this potential. With it we aim to survey the Large Magallenic
Cloud for sites of massive star formation at 3.5 m at the 1.4" di raction limit of
the telescope. We also discuss the potential for studying extra-galactic star formation
through a deep survey of the Hubble Deep Field{South in this band. We compare the
sensitivity of such surveys from Antarctica with those from mid-latitude sites, and
propose a 2m-class telescope, SPIRIT, which would be able to achieve unique new
science at low cost compared to the new generation of 8m-class telescopes now under
construction.
1 Introduction
Understanding star formation is an active research area in contemporary as-
trophysics. Of interest is the study of processes which occur as a single star
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