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

Jay Strader, Elias Aydi, Christopher Britt, Adam Burgasser, Laura Chomiuk, Will Clarkson, Brian D. Fields, Poshak Gandhi, Leo Girardi, John Gizis, Jacob Hogan, Michael A. C. Johnson, James Lauroesch, Michael Liu, Tom Maccarone, Peregrine McGehee, Dante Minniti, Koji Mukai, C. Tanner Murphey, Alexandre Roman-Lopez, Simone Scaringi, Jennifer Sobeck, Kirill Sokolovsky, Xilu Wang

Published 2018-11-29Version 1

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.