![]() |
![]() |
University of Birmingham > Talks@bham > Astrophysics Seminars > The Large Robotic Telescope: a facility for the new era of time domain astronomy
The Large Robotic Telescope: a facility for the new era of time domain astronomyAdd to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal
If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sean McGee. The Liverpool Telescope is a fully robotic, 2-metre class optical/infrared in operation on the Canary island of La Palma. The rapid response and flexibility of robotic telescopes make them ideal tools for study of the time variable sky. With the field of time domain astronomy set to be revolutionised by new discovery facilities such as LSST , plans are being made in Liverpool for a new robotic telescope to capitalise on this new era. This facility has the working title ‘Liverpool Telescope 2’ or the ‘Large Robotic Telescope’ and we aim to have it in operation on La Palma by ~2022. The core goal of the facility will be the follow-up of transients. The current generation of optical surveys have opened up a new era of transient astronomy, but at the same time have introduced a new problem: our discovery capability has dramatically outpaced our follow-up capacity, such that less than 10 per cent of new transients receive a spectroscopic classification, let alone any scientific exploitation. The follow-up gap is going to increase in size by orders of magnitude as we move into the LSST era. The same problem is inherent in the gravitational wave follow-up programme, the uncertainty in the sky position of any Advanced LIGO / Virgo detection is of the order of degrees. Surveying this error box is not the biggest problem in identifying an electromagnetic counterpart: the real challenge is distinguishing the counterpart from the many unrelated transient events in the region. The Large Robotic Telescope will be designed for the follow-up role: a fully robotic 4-metre telescope with a lightweight, fast-slewing design, providing a world-leading rapid response capability for efficient programmes of classification spectroscopy and the follow-up of fast-fading sources. In this talk I will detail the science case and provide an update on development of this new telescope. This talk is part of the Astrophysics Seminars series. This talk is included in these lists:Note that ex-directory lists are not shown. |
Other listscomputer sience Theoretical Physics Journal Club Computer Science Lunch Time Talk SeriesOther talksTurĂ¡n densities for hypergraph with quasirandom links Cross-study Bayesian Factor Regression in Heterogeneous High-dimensional Data Gravitational waves from black holes and neutron stars FnS - Teaching robots to grasp stuff Optical fiber sensing based on nanostructured coatings Anomalous Weak Localisation Phase in Ultra-Clean van der Waals Heterostructures |