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4/21/16: SO/NOAO Joint Colloquium Series: Christoph Baranec, Univ. of Hawaii

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Title: Robo-AO and the Rapid Transient Surveyor

Abstract:
As new large-scale astronomical surveys greatly increase the number of objects targeted and discoveries made, the requirement for efficient follow-up observations is crucial. Adaptive optics imaging, which compensates for the image-blurring effects of Earth's turbulent atmosphere, is essential for these surveys, but the scarcity, complexity and high demand of current systems limits their availability for following up large numbers of targets.

I will describe the Robo-AO system that we have built to address this need. Robo-AO is a fully autonomous laser adaptive optics and imaging system that routinely images over 200 objects per night with an acuity 10 times sharper at visible wavelengths than typically possible from the ground. I will highlight key science results (including a survey of nearly all of the ~3,600 Kepler exoplanet host stars), and our recent redeployment from the Palomar 1.5-m telescope to the Kitt Peak 2.1-m telescope.

I will additionally describe plans for the Rapid Transient Surveyor (RTS; proposed to NSF-MSIP), a permanently mounted, rapid-response, high-cadence facility for the UH 2.2-m telescope on Maunakea. RTS will build on the Robo-AO platform, adding a near-infrared integral field spectrograph (R~100, lambda = 840 - 1830 nm, 0.15" spaxels, 8.7"×6.0" FoV). RTS will achieve an acuity of ~0.07" in visible wavelengths and < 0.16" in the near infrared. Most importantly, there will be a gain of up to a factor of 7 in infrared point-source sensitivity for faint targets against the sky background, dramatically improving the efficiency of the spectrograph.

Our ultimate goal is to map the dark matter distribution in the z < 0.1 local universe with ten times better accuracy and precision than previous experiments. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Hawaii (PI: Tonry) will discover several thousand SNIae per year, measuring SNIa peak brightness, and decline rates, and RTS will measure reddening by dust, confirm SN type and confirm redshifts of the host galaxies. This unique combination of automated detection and characterization of astrophysical transients during a sustained observing campaign will yield the necessary statistics to precisely map dark matter in the local universe.

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