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Prepared by the LSST Science Collaborations, with contributions from the LSST Project. PrefaceMajor advances in our understanding of the Universe over the history of astronomy have often arisen from dramatic improvements in our ability to observe the sky to greater depth, in previously unexplored wavebands, with higher precision, or with improved spatial, spectral, or temporal resolution. Aided by rapid progress in information technology, current sky surveys are again changing the way we view and study the Universe, and the next-generation instruments, and the surveys that will be made with them, will maintain this revolutionary progress. Substantial progress in the important scientific problems of the next decade (determining the nature of dark energy and dark matter, studying the evolution of galaxies and the structure of our own Milky Way, opening up the time domain to discover faint variable objects, and mapping both the inner and outer Solar System) all require wide-field repeated deep imaging of the sky in optical bands.The wide-fast-deep science requirement leads to a single wide-field telescope and camera which can repeatedly survey the sky with deep short exposures. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a dedicated telecope with an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and a field of view of 9.6 deg 2 , will make major contributions to all these scientific areas and more. It will carry out a survey of 20,000 deg 2 of the sky in six broad photometric bands, imaging each region of sky roughly 2000 times (1000 pairs of back-to-back 15-sec exposures) over a ten-year survey lifetime.The LSST project will deliver fully calibrated survey data to the United States scientific community and the public with no proprietary period. Near real-time alerts for transients will also be provided worldwide. A goal is worldwide participation in all data products. The survey will enable comprehensive exploration of the Solar System beyond the Kuiper Belt, new understanding of the structure of our Galaxy and that of the Local Group, and vast opportunities in cosmology and galaxy evolution using data for billions of distant galaxies. Since many of these science programs will involve the use of the world's largest non-proprietary database, a key goal is maximizing the usability of the data. Experience with previous surveys is that often their most exciting scientific results were unanticipated at the time that the survey was designed; we fully expect this to be the case for the LSST as well.The purpose of this Science Book is to examine and document in detail science goals, opportunities, and capabilities that will be provided by the LSST. The book addresses key questions that will be confronted by the LSST survey, and it poses new questions to be addressed by future study. It contains previously available material (including a number of White Papers submitted to the ASTRO2010 Decadal Survey) as well as new results from a year-long campaign of study and evaluation. This book does not attempt to be complete; there are many ...

The advent of 8-10 meter class telescopes enables direct measurement of the chemical properties in the ionized gas of cosmologically-distant galaxies with the same nebular analysis techniques used in local H II regions. We show that spatially unresolved (i.e., global) emission line spectra can reliably indicate the chemical properties of distant star-forming galaxies. However, standard nebular chemical abundance measurement methods (those with a measured electron temperature from [O III] λ4363) may be subject to small systematic errors when the observed volume includes a mixture of gas with diverse temperatures,

We measure the relation between galaxy luminosity and disk circular velocity (the Tully-Fisher [TF] relation), in the g, r, i, and z bands, for a broadly selected sample of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with the goal of providing well-defined observational constraints for theoretical models of galaxy formation. The input sample of 234 galaxies has a roughly flat distribution of absolute magnitudes in the range À18:5 > M r > À22, and our only morphological selection is an isophotal axis ratio cut b/a < 0:6 to allow accurate inclination corrections. Long-slit spectroscopy from the Calar Alto and MDM observatories yields usable H rotation curves for 162 galaxies (69%), with a representative color and morphology distribution. We define circular velocities V 80 by evaluating the rotation curve at the radius containing 80% of the i-band light. Observational errors, including estimated distance errors due to peculiar velocities, are small compared to the intrinsic scatter of the TF relation. The slope of the forward TF relation steepens from À5:5 AE 0:2 mag ( log 10 km s À1 ) À1 in the g band to À6:6 AE 0:2 mag ( log 10 km s À1 ) À1 in the z band. The intrinsic scatter is % 0:4 mag in all bands, and residuals from either the forward or inverse relations have an approximately Gaussian distribution. We discuss how Malmquist-type biases may affect the observed slope, intercept, and scatter. The scatter is not dominated by rare outliers or by any particular class of galaxies, although it drops slightly, to % 0:36 mag, if we restrict the sample to nearly bulgeless systems. Correlations of TF residuals with other galaxy properties are weak: bluer galaxies are significantly brighter than average in the g-band TF relation but only marginally brighter in the i band; more concentrated (earlier type) galaxies are slightly fainter than average, and the TF residual is virtually independent of half-light radius, contrary to the trend expected for gravitationally dominant disks. The observed residual correlations do not account for most of the intrinsic scatter, implying that this scatter is instead driven largely by variations in the ratio of dark to luminous matter within the disk galaxy population.

In this paper, we derive scaling relations between photometric observable quantities and disc galaxy rotation velocity Vrot or Tully–Fisher relations (TFRs). Our methodology is dictated by our purpose of obtaining purely photometric, minimal‐scatter estimators of Vrot applicable to large galaxy samples from imaging surveys. To achieve this goal, we have constructed a sample of 189 disc galaxies at redshifts z < 0.1 with long‐slit Hα spectroscopy from Pizagno et al. and new observations. By construction, this sample is a fair subsample of a large, well‐defined parent disc sample of ∼170 000 galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7). The optimal photometric estimator of Vrot we find is stellar mass M★ from Bell et al., based on the linear combination of a luminosity and a colour. Assuming a Kroupa initial mass function (IMF), we find: log [V80/(km s−1)] = (2.142 ± 0.004) + (0.278 ± 0.010)[log (M★/M⊙) − 10.10], where V80 is the rotation velocity measured at the radius R80 containing 80 per cent of the i‐band galaxy light. This relation has an intrinsic Gaussian scatter dex and a measured scatter σmeas= 0.056 dex in log V80. For a fixed IMF, we find that the dynamical‐to‐stellar mass ratios within R80, (Mdyn/M★)(R80), decrease from approximately 10 to 3, as stellar mass increases from M★≈ 109 to 1011 M⊙. At a fixed stellar mass, (Mdyn/M★)(R80) increases with disc size, so that it correlates more tightly with stellar surface density than with stellar mass or disc size alone. We interpret the observed variation in (Mdyn/M★)(R80) with disc size as a reflection of the fact that disc size dictates the radius at which Mdyn/M★ is measured, and consequently, the fraction of the dark matter ‘seen’ by the gas at that radius. For the lowest M★ galaxies, we find a positive correlation between TFR residuals and disc sizes, indicating that the total density profile is dominated by dark matter on these scales. For the highest M★ galaxies, we find instead a weak negative correlation, indicating a larger contribution of stars to the total density profile. This change in the sense of the correlation (from positive to negative) is consistent with the decreasing trend in (Mdyn/M★)(R80) with stellar mass. In future work, we will use these results to study disc galaxy formation and evolution and perform a fair, statistical analysis of the dynamics and masses of a photometrically selected sample of disc galaxies.