A new high-tech astronomical instrument designed to find planets in faraway solar systems is up and running at the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea.
After nearly a decade in development, the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics, or SCExAO, is allowing astronomers to spy on distant worlds using experimental technology that better compensates for the blurring of images caused by turbulent air in the atmosphere.
“This has been a long time coming, but the payoff is worth it because it will be pretty groundbreaking,” Subaru astronomer Thayne Currie said last week.
One of the goals, he said, is to continually improve and upgrade the technology so that it can be used to enhance the next-generation Thirty Meter Telescope, which is planned for construction near the summit of Mauna Kea over the next decade.
The SCExAO and its adaptive optics work with a mirror that can be deformed to achieve control and correction of optical distortions. Computers take its performance to the next level.
Compared with Subaru’s current multipurpose adaptive optics system, known as AO188, the SCExAO is able to compensate more precisely for the blurring and does so at a faster rate, allowing it to deliver sharper images with reduced star glare.
“It allows you to see very close to the star 100 times faster than even a few years ago,” Currie said.
The results, he added, are “breathtaking.”
This year SCExAO is scheduled to experience additional improvements that will allow it to image even fainter planets orbiting much closer to their host stars. Combining SCExAO with an experimental detector expected to be delivered later in 2017 will eventually allow it to find planets 10 to 100 times fainter than those it can currently view, including mature planets in reflected light.
Within a couple of years, Currie said, the SCExAO should be able to identify not only the young version of massive planets like Jupiter, but also mature planets that are fainter.
But the new planet finder is already making discoveries. After just a few nights of having achieved operational capability in October, SCExAO made its first significant find, offering up the first images of a debris disk around a star found in the Taurus constellation.
The debris disk — a ring of dust and debris in orbit around a star — is apparently located about twice the distance from its star that our debris disk, the Kuiper belt, is from the sun.
Scientific analysis indicates that the disk is likely composed of debris produced as a result of icy planet formation, and is likely part of a young group of stars born about 3 million to 10 million years ago.
It may be the youngest debris disk ever imaged, scientists said, and is likely a key laboratory for studying the earliest stages of icy planet formation.
“We barely flipped the on switch for SCExAO and already saw a new planetary system,” astronomer Nemanja Jovanovic said in a news release. “The future, which includes a fully optimized SCExAO, is extremely promising.”
A research paper describing the discovery of the debris disk, known as HD 36546, has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Currie is the primary author.
While there are similar planet finders in operation in Arizona and Chile, Currie said he thinks it’s only a matter of time before the one in Hawaii advances beyond the others, in part because of the optimal viewing conditions found atop 13,796-foot Mauna Kea.
Currie said he’s hoping the stalled TMT becomes a reality atop Hawaii’s tallest mountain, where dry, stable and cloud-free astronomical viewing conditions reign supreme.
If the powerful telescope is diverted for construction in the Canary Islands — as its developer has been threatening to do if a building permit is not granted soon — there’s a chance the water vapor found at that elevation will not allow the SCExAO technology to optimally perform there, he said.
“SCExAO is the type of instrument that will one day show us another planet that might be like the earth,” Currie said. “This is the kind of new knowledge that makes TMT worth it for Hawaii.”
