While it is true that Adaptive Optics cancel out the effects of the atmospheric turbulence in astronomical observations, such simplifying statement carried along a number of possible schemes for the image degradation compensation (sometimes referred to as "flavors") and involves a number of further constraints, the sky coverage being one of the most prominent. I will try to make an overview of...
The Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) is the new Adaptive Optics (AO) instrument for the VLT aiming to replace NACO and SINFONI. Its development is led by a Consortium of Max-Planck Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), UK Astronomy Technology Centre, ETH Zurich, Leiden University, European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF). ERIS...
MAVIS is a multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) equipped system, designed to be coupled with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Adaptive Optics Facility, with the aim to deliver visible images and integral field spectrograph data with 2-3x better angular resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope. The imager will deliver diffraction-limited image quality in the V band, in a 30”x30” field of...
MAORY is the Adaptive Optics Module for the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).
Coupled with MICADO, the high resolution camera, will enalble the ELT to
perform diffraction limited near infrared observations. I will describe the
MAORY project and I will illustrate the scientific drivers of the MAORY-MICADO
combination.
The Large Binocular Telescope has been conceived as an adaptive telescope, with two deformable secondary mirrors that can serve every gregorian foci and a strong vocation towards the development of state-of-the-art AO instrumentation. The combination of superb wavefront control and 22m baseline binocular capability makes of LBT a yet unrivaled machine, particularly in the field of high angular...
SHARK-NIR is a coronagraphic instrument conceived to exploit the excellent performance in terms of resolution and contrast of the LBT Adaptive Optics system SOUL. Coupled with its visible counterpart SHARK-VIS, it will offer the possibility to perform binocular observations combining direct imaging, coronagraphic imaging and coronagraphic low resolution spectroscopy in a wide wavelength...
SHARK-VIS, the forthcoming high-angular-resolution and high-contrast optical (400-900 nm) imager for the LBT, is an INAF PI-instrument (PI Fernando Pedichini) designed and built by the ADONI group of the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma. Its first light is foreseen around mid 2020. SHARK-VIS and its near-infrared counterpart SHARK-NIR will take full advantage of the new LBT extreme-AO...
The solar atmosphere is structured to very small scales which are dynamic in nature. Driven by the quest for higher spatial resolution observations, several AO systems have been deployed at major ground-based solar telescopes during the last two decades. Current high-resolution solar telescopes, which are in the 1-1.5 class, utilise AO routinely to achieve the diffraction limit at visible and...
Information about solar system small bodies’ size, shape and surface structures is crucial to shed light on the mechanisms behind planetary accretion and evolution.
Until very recently, a detailed characterization of such properties could be obtained only for the handful of objects visited by space missions.
However, new-generation adaptive-optics instruments can open a new frontier in...
The European Solar Telescope (EST) will provide spectro-polarimetric measurements of the solar atmosphere with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy within one arcminute field of view. To this purpose, its optical scheme, as well as its MCAO system, are designed to minimize the instrumental polarization. We report on ongoing activities related to the EST MCAO, which include further design...
During their lifetimes, sunspots show several dynamic phenomena whose underlying physical processes still need to be clarified. For example, the formation process of the penumbra remains unclear because of the need for long time-series of high-resolution observations that are hardly acquired with present-day telescopes. We report the results derived from analysis of unique observations carried...
The exoplanet science has received great benefit from the availability of AO instrumentation, especially with the building of the last generation of extreme AO systems. I this talk I summarize the main scientific results achieved in the last years with the direct imaging techniques, the perspectives for planet detection and characterization with future instrumentation, and the synergies with...
The SPHERE planet imager is now operating at the VLT since five years.
I will present here a description of the instrument and of its performance. Morover
I will introduce the data reduction methods needed to extract science result from
the instrument data. Finally I will review the main outcome obtained from the instrument in it operativity period.
The combination of transit surveys and radial-velocity programs has revolutionized our understanding of planets orbiting close to their host stars and our understanding of exoplanetary systems in general. However, a detailed comprehension of the orbital and physical properties and frequencies of extrasolar planets at orbital separations beyond that of Jupiter in the Solar System, and how they...
I will briefly discuss how detect and characterize very young planets. This requires to select the right targets and to use a multi-wavelength approach. I will illustrate the key observations using a few examples.
Star formation, and in particular formation, evolution and dissipation of protoplanetary disks is a hot topic in nowadays astronomy because it bridges the classic study of star formation to the new discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets.
In this talk I will review the role of AO in star formation, focusing in particular on how our understanding on formation, evolution and...
In the past decades the exoplanets hunting has improved so much that thousands of planets have been confirmed and partially characterized. Both indirect and direct detecting techniques have filled this huge sample, from the terrestrial to the gas giant and brown dwarf regime. One further step would be to detect exomoons and disks/rings around exoplanets, that we expect to be there taking as a...
In this contribution I will present and discuss the exploitation of AO-assisted
spectroscopic instrumentation (both integral field and long-slit) in order to detect and characterise exoplanet and brown dwarf population.
Fundamental information on mass, separation, age, surface gravity and clouds (more in general atmospheric properties) can be inferred via this kind of observations,...
In the last years, ALMA has revolutionised the field of plant formation.
The high angular resolution campaigns are showing a great variety of protoplanetary disk morphologies, revealing the presence of rings, gaps, cavities and spirals.
Such sub-structures suggest the presence of young giant planets that perturbs the mass distribution and dynamics of gas and dust in the disk.
And yet, a...
In the last years, SPHERE has revolutionized the field of planet formation. Also thanks to Subaru/HiCiao, GPI, and VLT/NACO, the number of protoplanetary disks observed in near-IR scattered light now amounts to more than 100. This census reveals, similarly to ALMA, the high occurrence of disk sub-structures that are likely due to the gravitational interaction with (forming) planets. Yet, the...
Ground-based imagers assisted by Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems are the technological frontier to obtain high-quality stellar photometry and astrometry in crowded fields at the highest possible spatial resolution. I will review the main scientific results obtained in the last years in the field of stellar populations by using AO data and key advancements in their exploitation....
In this talk I will discuss state-of-the art scientific use and
future perspectives of integral field spectroscopy assisted by
adaptive optics as an optimal multi-object capability in dense
stellar fields.
We discuss some science cases that will exploit the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) diffraction limit power. We focus on a novel and detailed analysis of a young star cluster in the Large Magellanic cloud, R136–like. The main aim of this study is to quantify precision and accuracy of stellar proper motions measurements in crowded field when using an ELT working at its diffraction limit. This...
We plan to discuss a few medium resolution near infrared spectral features that can be used to contrain metallicity distribution of old (RR Lyrae, Type II Cepheids) and young (Classical Cepheids) stellar tracers in crowded and highly reddened regions of the Galactic inter bulge and of the Galactic thin disk. In particular, we will focus our attention on the key opportunity to couple NIR/MIR...
MCAO are a cornerstone technology for current and future telescopes (g.e. ELT). The synergy between high-resolution near-infrared imagers and MCAO systems is already leading the way for the characterisation of the stellar content and the structural properties of all of those systems in the Galaxy for which optical observations are almost totally useless. I will give an overview of the results...
The formation and evolution of galaxies, and in particular of the Milky Way, is one of the major puzzles of astrophysics: a detailed physical scenario is still missing, and its understanding requires the joint effort of observations and theories. The evolution with time of the chemical content of a galaxy is one of the topic constraints to understand the most relevant mechanisms driving...
We present optical and NIR photometry for the Galactic globular M30. We focussed our attention on this globular because it is a post core collapsed, this means that the innermost regions display a cusp in density distribution. Moreover, M30 was observed with gound- and space-based (HST) telescopes. In particular, NIR images were collected with both seeing limited NIR array (SOFI@NTT),...
Adaptive Optics correction retrieves PSF temporally and spatially variating following the optical turbulence dynamics. The stability of the energy ratio core/wings affect the photometric precision, and the spatial variation of the shape of the PSF core makes complicated the morphology analysis of quasi point-like sources. Time averaging mitigates the temporal variation effect while spatial...
MICADO@EELT will be the workhorse facility for Adaptive Optic assisted
ground-breaking NIR deep high spatial-resolution imaging and
spectroscopy of the next decade. Modern ground-based large telescopes
depend heavily on AO systems to correct for atmospheric
turbulence. The recovery of the intrinsic properties of the observed
sources (position, photometry, morphology) depends critically on...
In the AO era, the intrinsic complexity and variability of the point spread function (PSF) poses severe challenges to the analysis of optical and NIR images.
I will present preliminary results from a new astro-photometric software which we specifically designed to deal with spatially complex and variable PSFs.
The software iteratively build a series of numerical PSFs from different regions...
Precise stellar photometry and astrometry require the best possible modelling of the point spread function (PSF). To date, the best performances have been obtained when building the PSF directly from the image of dense stellar fields, exploiting the fact that each star represents a different realisation of the same PSF. The recent advent of the Adaptive Optics technique makes this method more...
Diffraction-limited frames sequences, containing millions of pupil-stabilized images acquired at kHz rate after Extreme Adaptive Optics (ExAO) correction, will be the baseline outcome of SHARK-VIS, the forthcoming high-contrast imager in the visible band for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT).
Such fast-cadence imaging concept allows us to freeze the evolution of the ExAO residual speckles,...
Modern astronomy is strongly supported by the considerable development of the technology: the effort towards probing new AO methods, building new instrumentation and systems is tightly correlated to the progress in science. The next generation of telescopes have to demonstrate to be up to the task, meeting the expectations of the astronomical community. This can be partially ensured conducing...
The Starfinder code (Diolaiati et Al 2000) has been the first attempt to face with the typical adaptive optics structured Point Spread Function (PSF) in dense star fields to accomplish astrometric and photometric analysis. The next release of the software will also handle a variation of the PSF across the Field of View (FoV) including the option of an analytical variation model that can be...
The activities related to the INAF IT had a heavy acceleration in the last year, also related to the infrastructure of the Bologna Tecnopole, the assignment of the CINECA-led Euro HPC project, the SKA and CTA projects. This acceleration has made that the experience gained with national calculation, storage and archives projects (eg MoU CINECA, CHIPP project, connection with the Commercial...
The incoming AO imagers and spectrographs ERIS and MAVIS for ESO/VLT are specifically designed to maximize sky coverage, in particular to allow for extragalactic studies. ERIS will cover the near-IR bands starting from early 2021, MAVIS will observe in the optical from ~2025. I will discuss what are the cutting-edge questions that these instruments will contribute to answer, and what are the...
Gravitational lensing is allowing us to access physical scales and
luminosities in the distant Universe with unprecedented accuracy,
offering the opportunity to infer key physical quantities otherwise
unaccessible without AO. While such scientific programs are somehow
propaedeutic, AO technology coupled with cosmic telescopes will project
astronomers into a new territory. I'll present...
Environmental effects play a primary role in galaxy evolution and in
particular in shaping the star formation history of galaxies in groups
and even more so in dense environments.
The MUSE IFU has allowed to study in detail how environmental effects
act in shaping galaxy properties, its limitation being essentially the
spatial resolution that can be reached using...
The selection of passive galaxies in the early (z>3) Universe is very challenging, and crucial to constrain theoretical modelling of the processes responsible for their rapid assembly and abrupt shut-down of the star formation. I will describe the careful selection method which we developed to single out quiescent galaxies at high z in the CANDELS fields. I will present the resulting sample of...
Despite the limitations in terms of sky coverage and corrections, current AO facilities are providing a unique, high spatial resolution view of AGNs and their hosts. After presenting some examples of the results obtained, I will discuss the unsolved issues that will be tackled by the advent of the new generation IR and optical AO fed Integral Field Spectrographs, ERIS and MAVIS at VLT.
Relic galaxies, low-redshift old compact massive galaxies, are thought to be local counterparts of red and quiescent compact massive galaxies at high-z (the so called "red nuggets"), that missed the channels of galaxy size growth and evolved undisturbed since their first mass assembly. Therefore, they represent the perfect laboratories to study the mass assembly in the early universe through...
The blast wave of young supernova remnant are often associated with Balmer emission produced by the excitation of neutral Hydrogen in the ISM by shocked ions. The resulting Balmer lines contain information on the shock structure, in particular connected to the plasma temperature, speed, ionization fraction and turbulence level. If the same shock accelerate efficiently cosmic rays (CRs), the...
