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Astronomical instrumentation

Atmospheric blurring has a new enemy

Nature volume 512, pages 144–145 (2014)Cite this article

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A fully automated optics system that corrects atmospheric blurring of celestial objects has imaged 715 star systems thought to harbour planets, completing each observation in less time than it takes to read this article.

At the time of writing, observations from the Kepler Space Mission have yielded more than 975 confirmed exoplanet detections from 4,234 candidates1. These candidates are identified by small, periodic drops in the brightness of the star, indicating that a planet might be transiting in front of it2. This is perhaps the conceptually simplest method of finding exoplanets, and it remains the only approach that can find planets with the proper orbit and radius to potentially support life. However, follow-up observations of high spatial resolution are needed to confirm and characterize each candidate system detected by the Kepler mission. Writing in The Astrophysical Journal, Law et al.3 describe how they have used a robotic adaptive optics system4,5 to follow up 715 of the Kepler candidate star systems in just 36 hours of observing time.

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Figure 1: Creating artificial guide stars.

Christoph Baranec

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brent Ellerbroek is in the Instrumentation Department, Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corporation, Pasadena, California 90807, USA.,

    Brent Ellerbroek

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  1. Brent Ellerbroek
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Correspondence to Brent Ellerbroek.

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Ellerbroek, B. Atmospheric blurring has a new enemy. Nature 512, 144–145 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/512144a

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