Robo-AO, the world's first robot laser adaptive optic system, is being used by a team of scientists to explore thousands of exoplanet systems.
The robotic system is being used to study exoplanets at resolutions approaching those of the Hubble Space Telescope, according to Daily News & Analysis. Terrestrial telescopes use the robot to get rid of image-blurring effects of Earth's turbulent atmosphere, so they can capture sharper images than they would from the ground.
Christoph Baranec of the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Institute for Astronomy, one of the scientists in the international team, said they are using Robo-AO to collect details about all the candidate exoplanet host stars that NASA's Kepler mission has found.
"While Kepler has an unrivaled ability to discover exoplanets that pass between us and their host star, it comes at the price of reduced image quality, and that's where Robo-AO excels," Baranec said, Phys.org reported.
The team has already found interesting results from the Robo-AO/Kepler exoplanet host survey. Prof. Nicholas Law, the system's project scientist and lead author from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, said that they discovered that "hot Jupiters," which are rare giant exoplanets in tight orbits, are three times more likely to be found in wide binary star systems than other exoplanets.
"Going further, Robo-AO's unique capabilities have allowed us to discover even rarer objects: binary star systems where each star has a Kepler-detected planetary system of its own," Law said. "These systems will be uniquely interesting for studies of how the planet formed- and for science fiction about what life would be like with another planetary system right next door."
715 Kepler candidate exoplanet hosts are covered in the first Robo-AO survey, which is the biggest scientific adaptive optics survey to date, Daily News & Analysis reported. The Robo-AO team is looking to image all of the 4,000 Kepler candidate exoplanet hosts and beat the original survey's record. The scientists will also observe exoplanet hosts that will be found on Kepler's new K2 mission.
Thanks to its efficiency, Robo-AO has already managed to make more than 13,000 observations, Phys.org reported.
"The automation of laser adaptive optics has allowed us to tackle scientific questions that were unimaginable just a few years ago. We can now observe tens of thousands of objects at Hubble-Space-Telescope-like resolution in short periods of time," Baranec said. "Now that the technology has been proven, we're looking to bring it to the pristine skies of Maunakea, Hawaii, where it will be even more powerful."
The team published their research on Robo-AO in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
