With Recent Improvements to the GBT surface and Receiver stability, MUSTANG is currently capable of mapping a 3'x3' field to an RMS of  
400  uJy/bm in 1 hr

MUSTANG's 3.3mm Continuum band is ideal for studying a wide range of science both Galactic and Extragalactic.

Proposed uses include: Observations of many of these objects have already been performed during commissioning and early science runs.  Some examples are displayed below.


Galaxy cluster RXJ1347-1145. Colorscale and white contours are MUSTANG SZ effect.
At 9", this is the highest angular resolution image of the SZ effect made to date. Red contours represent
positive MUSTANG flux from the AGN in the Brightest central galaxy of the cluster.  
Green contours are smoothed X-ray contours from Chandra.

A strong enhancement of the SZ effect is seen to the SE of the cluster center.  First noticed by Komatsu et al, this suggests the presence of extremely hot (>20keV) plasma in this region.  Substructures like this can only be revealed by resolved SZ images as gas this hot will peak out of band for most x ray telescopes like Chandra.  This enhancement is likely to be caused by shock heated gas in a recent major merger of subclusters.  RXJ1347-1145 is the most luminous x ray cluster yet detected.


Colorbars are in Units of Jy/beam.  The MUSTANG map of the Orion nebula is shown here on three linear scales to convey the dynamic range of the measurement (order 1000).  This map simultaneously displays  the Free-Free emission from the HII region surrounding young hot O-stars in the Trapezium as well as Thermal Dust emission from the  molecular cloud OMC-1.  The bright compact objects are dense cores in the cloud where high mass star formation is ongoing.  The brightest feature is the Kleinman-Low nebula (Orion KL).


Located at the center of the Flame Nebula, just several degrees north of Orion, the MUSTANG  NGC2024 map displays three dense cores embedded in a molecular cloud.  The bright diffuse emission comes from Free-Free emission from the HII region.  The fourth point source is thought to be an ultra compact HII region as it is not seen in sub-millimeter data.

This large map (.4 deg x .3deg) of the HII regions in the W3 main star-forming complex demonstrates MUSTANG's potential for large surveys.    This type of map is useful for both surveys of the galactic plane and for blind point source deep fields to probe statistics of high-z dusty star forming galaxies.  Large fields allow for scanning patterns which move the telescope rapidly, this modulates the signal to higher frequencies avoiding 1/f atmospheric fluctuations.








Both above maps are composite images.  Here blue is optical data from archival Palomar 48"  exposures and red is MUSTANG data.  3.3mm is a very interesting band for studying AGN.  Emission here is the long wavelength end of  rapidly falling synchrotron spectra.  By measuring a spectrum at various points along the jet using longer wavelength VLA data, we can probe the aging of relativistic electrons.  The existence of a spectral break suggests that the electrons must be re-accelerated outside the nucleus.





M82 is an irregular "Cigar" galaxy.   The emission we see from MUSTANG comes from the very active star-formation ongoing in this galaxy.  We pick up both the free-free emission from the ionized gas and the thermal dust emission.