The Cycling of Matter from the Interstellar Medium to Stars and back: The CCAT-prime Galactic Ecology project

The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) at the CCAT observatory will be a novel 6 m aperture telescope enabling highly sensitive wide field observations at submillimeter wavelengths to address science topics ranging from the formation of molecular clouds and stars, the evolution of the interstellar medium (ISM) in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, to galaxies in the early universe and cosmology. The telescope will be deployed near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor at 5600 m altitude in the chilean Atacama desert and become operational in late 2024.

The CCAT-prime Galactic Ecology project (GEco) is one of the key science projects of the observatory designed to study the formation and evolution of molecular clouds in the Milky Way, the Magellanic clouds, and other nearby galaxies through submm spectroscopy. The GEco project will do this with dedicated large scale surveys in spectrally resolved lines of CO ($J=4-3$ and $7-6$) and atomic carbon (CI $^3$P$_1 - {}^3$P$_0$ and $^3$P$_2 - {}^3$P$_1$) that become possible with the novel large format CCAT-prime Heterodyne Array Instrument (CHAI).