Celebrating 30 Years of Science from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

摘要

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) has been the world's most successfulsingle dish telescope at submillimetre wavelengths since it began operations in1987. From the pioneering days of single-element photometers and mixers,through the first modest imaging arrays, leading to the state-of-the-artwidefield camera SCUBA-2 and the spectrometer array HARP, the JCMT has beenassociated with a number of major scientific discoveries. Famous for thediscovery of "SCUBA" galaxies, which are responsible for a large fraction ofthe far-infrared background, to the first images of huge discs of cool debrisaround nearby stars, possibly giving us clues to the evolution of planetarysystems, the JCMT has pushed the sensitivity limits more than any otherfacility in this most difficult of wavebands in which to observe. Nowapproaching the 30th anniversary of the first observations the telescopecontinues to carry out unique and innovative science. In this review article welook back on just some of the scientific highlights from the past 30 years.