The Plane's The Thing: The Case for Wide-Fast-Deep Coverage of the Galactic Plane and Bulge

• Main Authors: Strader, Jay, Aydi, Elias, Britt, Christopher, Burgasser, Adam, Chomiuk, Laura, Clarkson, Will, Fields, Brian D, Gandhi, Poshak, Girardi, Leo, Gizis, John, Hogan, Jacob, Johnson, Michael A. C, Lauroesch, James, Liu, Michael, Maccarone, Tom, McGehee, Peregrine, Minniti, Dante, Mukai, Koji, Murphey, C. Tanner, Roman-Lopez, Alexandre, Scaringi, Simone, Sobeck, Jennifer, Sokolovsky, Kirill, Wang, Xilu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 29-11-2018
• Subjects: Physics - Astrophysics of Galaxies; Physics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics; Physics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1811.12433

We argue that the exclusion of the Galactic Plane and Bulge from the uniform
wide-fast-deep (WFD) LSST survey cadence is fundamentally inconsistent with two
of the main science drivers of LSST: Mapping the Milky Way and Exploring the
Transient Optical Sky. We outline the philosophical basis for this claim and
then describe a number of important science goals that can only be addressed by
WFD-like coverage of the Plane and Bulge.