Appearing in this week’s New Scientist (15 January 2011, pp 20-21) is a story with the provocative title: “Rise of the Robot Astronomers.” The story places a great deal of emphasis on the growing role of Artificial Intelligence for the detection of transients and for the automated detection of outliers indicative of rarer objects such as quasars and the role of automated telescopes to support rapid follow-up imaging and analysis. Here are some of the highlights:
- Forthcoming sky surveys such as the LSST will detect 100,000 transients every night!
- The Palomar Transit Factory is a successful effort to automate the detection, classification, cross-validation of transient phenomena, as well as supporting triggers for robotic follow-up observations by other observatories.
- The Heterogeneous Telescope Network (HTN) consortium is also working on software languages for communication between multiple robotic observatories including NASA’s SWIFT satellite and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Described as a “chatroom” for robotic telescopes.
- Robotic observatories are also ideal for remote locations. For example, the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT) operates at 4500m altitude and is part of the COSMOGRAIL (Cosmological Monitoring of Gravitational Lenses) initiative.
Here is a brief video describing the Palomar Transient Factory and how discoveries and follow-up observations are coordinated across sites around the world. To date, the PTF has discovered nearly 1,000 supernovae.
