Motivation

COLIBRI is a very ambitious Franco-Mexican collaboration aimed at addressing major scientific issues:

• What are the physical properties of Trans-Neptunian Objects, the most distant known bodies in our Solar System? How are these physical properties related to the orbital parameters? What can this tell us about the formation and evolution of our Solar System?
• How are planetary systems formed? How do the planets evolve? How can we explain their diversity?
• Do low-mass stars and brown dwarves form and evolve in the same way as stars like our Sun?
• How do massive stars form and what is their impact on their surrounding medium in galaxies? What is their role in triggering the formation of a new generation of stars?
• What are the astrophysical sources at the origin of the observed gravitational waves and the highly energetic neutrinos?
• What are the mechanisms behind the most violent phenomena in the universe, such as the GRBs? Can we use these transient sources to probe the deep Universe?
• When did the first stars and galaxies form? What is their nature? How much do they contribute to the reionisation of the universe?

To achieve this, the COLIBRI collaboration is developing a telescope with very high availability for alert observations (~90%), very good sensitivity (1.3 meter mirror diameter), fast pointing speed (on target in less than 20 sec), multiband photometric capability (from 400 to 1800 nm, with three simultaneous channels), and a large field of view (26 arc-minutes in diameter).

COLIBRI will be hosted by the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional on Sierra San Pedro Mártir, Baja California, Mexico.