2019/04/12 by Nicholas P. Ross, Ross, Nicholas P., Roberto J. Assef +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.06160
openalex publication_date 2019/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This White Pape motivates the time domain extragalactic science case for the NASA Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam). NEOCam is a NASA Planetary mission whose goal is to discover and characterize asteroids and comets, to assess the hazard to Earth from near-Earth objects, and to study the origin, evolution, and fate of asteroids and comets. NEOCam will, however, cover 68% of the extragalactic sky and as the NEOWISE-R mission has recently proved, infrared information is now vital for identifying and characterizing the \gtrsim10 million IR bright Active Galactic Nuclei, as well as using the IR light curve to provide deep insights into accretion disk astrophysics. NEOWISE-R data has also been used to discover Super-luminous Supernovae, dust echos in Tidal Disruption Events and detects all of the known z≥7 quasars (and over 80% of the known z≥6.70 quasars). As such, for relatively little additional cost, adding the capacity for additional NEOCam data processing (and/or alerting) would have a massive scientific and legacy impact on extragalactic time domain science.