Robo-AO First Science Workshop May 20, 2010

The Demo Period Robo-AO Science Workshop Agenda

Robo-AO: Demo Period Nicholas Law

The Demo Period 4 weeks on the Palomar 60” Q Mission: do lots of great science

What’s unique to Robo- AO? Large surveys High efficiency Continual availability Great sky coverage Visible-light & high speed imaging

Demo Period Goals Variety of science programs Extragalactic Transients Stars Planets... Cover all Robo-AO unique capabilities Large surveys High efficiency Visible-light AO High NIR Strehl Resulting in great science... and a large group of papers

Survey Programs Binarity survey all spectral types, companions down to brown dwarfs for most cover range of stellar parameter space with one instrument and one coherent survey

Monitoring Trent Dupuy 2008, 2009

High availability programs The Palomar Transient Factory finds 1 transient candidate every ~10 minutes Many found near galactic nuclei - how do we separate them? NewOldSubtraction

5/17/20102Astronomy Tea Talk High-speed, high-resolution imaging

How much time is one month? Overheads secs: telescope pointing & settling 20 secs: Centering on target & verification 10 secs: WFS calibration, wait for loop to close Assume: no science in first week 50% uptime 30% weather losses Conservatively ~60 hours, or 1800 targets at 2 mins per target However, we need about 5000 targets for contingency!

Types of demo programs Large, 1000 targets Need to be very exciting papers -- only 2-3 possible High-risk if incomplete Medium, targets 10+ projects Lower risk Others eg. transient followup (equiv. to 4m in sensitivity...)

Demo period capabilities General AO imaging NIR & Visible [specific NIR camera TBD] Dithering, standard observation sequences, etc. Visible-light high-speed imaging Efficiency will improve throughout run Likely semi-robotic system Probably manual target lists to start with Maybe some simple scheduling by end of demo

Decision process Projects defined by September Robo-AO team will collaborate, provide data, and support for data reduction, in exchange for paper authorship Mini-TAC process within Robo-AO team Current science team: C. Baranec, R. Dekany, J. Johnson, M. Kasliwal, M. van Kerkwijk, S. Kulkarni, N. Law, T. Morton, E. Ofek, A. Ramaprakash, R. Riddle, S. Tendulkar

Robo-AO Astrometry (1) Nicholas Law

Astrometric Performance Limits Signal, noise, and image size (photon statistics): Systematics Focal plane distortion Atmospheric refraction (inc. chromatic effects) Changes in instrument / telescope Atmospheric turbulence

Astrometric Performance Limits Focal plane distortion Atmospheric refraction (inc. chromatic effects) Changes in instrument / telescope Atmospheric turbulence Detailed calibration using crowded fields Work in narrow bands in the near-IR: in a 30nm bandpass at 2.0μm refraction effects are < 50μas Don’t do that! Robo-AO won’t Don’t do that! Robo-AO won’t Complicated... but that’s what Robo-AO is for

BandSNR Compared to 1.5 m SNR Compared to 4 m FWHM (1” is typical) Strehl J2.9X0.4X0.2”50% H7.1X0.98X0.26”70% Robo-AO Astrometry Astrometric precision gains in FWHM & SNR With careful experimental design, performance limited by atmospheric tip/tilt jitter (see Cameron et al. 2009) Prediction of performance: uas precision in minutes (depending on details of target & field)

Integration time / seconds

2 milliarcsec

M-dwarf Planetary Populations Only 16 planetary systems detected around M-dwarfs (<~0.6 solar masses) Several hundred detected around solar-type stars M-dwarfs are very FAINT and red for RV searches Only the highest-mass M-dwarfs (<M3) have been probed with radial velocity searches Even so, some of the most interesting systems have been found around M- dwarfs Gl M Earth 16 M Earth 5 M Earth 7 M Earth Mayor et al 2009 arXiv:

M-dwarf Astrometric AO Planet Survey Target M-dwarfs in galactic plane Few hundred microarcsec precision per epoch Sensitive to Jupiter-mass planets in few-month orbits Competitive with (future) ~10 m/s radial velocity surveys around mid M-dwarfs for few month orbits

Robo-AO: Binarity Survey Nicholas Law

Multiplicity in solar neighborhood 5/17/20102Astronomy Tea Talk Various surveys Solar type stars: Duquennoy & Mayor (1991) More recent RV surveys Some AO BD surveys (eg. Gelino et al.) All targets M-dwarfs Lots of ~50-target AO surveys RV surveys starting up for planet searches Other types have a similar patchwork of surveys

Robo-AO’s contribution 5/17/20102Astronomy Tea Talk 8 Target groups A, F, G, K, M0-3, M3-6, M6-9, L0+ Sensitivity High-mass BD companions in ~120 secs (at large radii) Main sequence companions at most separations In visible, white dwarf companions reachable CPM confirmation in 1 month is conceivable Target numbers 150 targets per night Useful contribution in targets per target group Large, coherent, well-understood-bias survey