Publications (22)
Discovery of Precursor LBV Outbursts in Two Recent Optical Transients: The Fitfully Variable Missing Links UGC 2773-OT and SN 2009ip
Nathan Smith, Adam A. Miller, Weidong Li +11
We present progenitor-star detections, light curves, and optical spectra of SN2009ip and the 2009 optical transient in UGC2773 (U2773-OT), which were not genuine SNe. Precursor var…
Confirmation of Color Dependent Centroid Shift Measured After 1.8 years with HST
Aparna Bhattacharya, David Bennett, Jean Philippe Beaulieu +10
We measured precise masses of the host and planet in OGLE-2003-BLG-235 system, when the lens and source were resolving, with 2018 Keck high resolution images. This measurement is i…
Proper motions of the Arches cluster with Keck-LGS Adaptive Optics: the first kinematic mass measurement of the Arches
Will Clarkson, Andrea Ghez, Mark Morris +5
We report the first detection of the intrinsic velocity dispersion of the Arches cluster - a young (~2 Myr), massive (~10,000 Solar Mass) starburst cluster located near the Galacti…
A Spectroscopic Search for Dormant Black Holes in Low-Metallicity Binaries
Pranav Nagarajan, Kareem El-Badry, Henrique Reggiani +9
The discovery of the massive black hole (BH) system Gaia BH3 in pre-release Gaia DR4 data suggests that wide BH binaries with luminous companions may be significantly overrepresent…
Community Involvement in the WFIRST Exoplanet Microlensing Survey
David P. Bennett, Rachel Akeson, Thomas Barclay +22
WFIRST is NASA's first flagship mission with pre-defined core science programs to study dark energy and perform a statistical census of wide orbit exoplanets with a gravitational m…
Towards Resource Efficient and Interpretable Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models
Schrasing Tong, Eliott Zemour, Jessica Lu +2
Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in a wide range of applications, they have also been observed to perpetuate unwanted biases present in t…
A search for black holes with metal-poor stellar companions: I. Survey sample selection and single epoch radial velocity follow-up
Casey Y. Lam, Joshua D. Simon, Kareem El-Badry +3
Stellar-mass black holes (BHs) above are predicted to form from low-metallicity progenitors, but direct detections of such systems in the Milky Way remain scarce. Moti…
US Adaptive Optics Roadmap to Achieve Astro2020
Julian Christou, Mark Chun, Richard Dekany +4
In the recent Astro2020 Decadal Report, ''Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s'' Adaptive Optics (AO) was identified as a crucial technology for a vari…
On-sky capabilities and performance of the Keck All Sky Precision Adaptive Optics system
Avinash Surendran, Maxwell Service, Jacques R. Delorme +21
The Keck All Sky Precision Adaptive optics (KAPA) project upgrades the Keck I adaptive optics system to enable laser tomography using a four laser guide star (LGS) asterism. KAPA i…
PANTERA. I. Hunting for the Most Metal-Rich Stars in the Solar Neighborhood with High-Resolution Spectroscopy
Serat M. Saad, D. M. Rowan, K. Z. Stanek +4
The paper presents the PANTERA high‑resolution spectroscopic survey of 56 nearby metal‑rich stars, measuring their iron abundances and finding many ultra‑metal‑rich objects while e…
Astro2020 Science White Paper: The Local Relics of of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds
Jenny E Greene, Aaron Barth, Andrea Bellini +18
We have compelling evidence for stellar-mass black holes (BHs) of ~5-80 M_sun that form through the death of massive stars. We also have compelling evidence for so-called supermass…
The Planetary Systems Imager: 2-5 Micron Channel
Andrew J. Skemer, Deno Stelter, Dimitri Mawet +15
We summarize the red channel (2-5 micron) of the Planetary Systems Imager (PSI), a proposed second-generation instrument for the TMT. Cold exoplanets emit the majority of their lig…
Roman Early-Definition Astrophysics Survey Opportunity: Galactic Roman Infrared Plane Survey (GRIPS)
Roberta Paladini, Catherine Zucker, Robert Benjamin +67
A wide-field near-infrared survey of the Galactic disk and bulge/bar(s) is supported by a large representation of the community of Galactic astronomers. The combination of sensitiv…
The Adaptive Optics Summer School Laboratory Activities
S. Mark Ammons, Scott Severson, J. D. Armstrong +17
Adaptive Optics (AO) is a new and rapidly expanding field of instrumentation, yet astronomers, vision scientists, and general AO practitioners are largely unfamiliar with the root…
DO-CRIME: Dynamic On-sky Covariance Random Interaction Matrix Evaluation, a novel method for calibrating adaptive optics systems
Olivier Lai, Mark Chun, Ryan Dungee +2
Adaptive optics systems require a calibration procedure to operate, whether in closed loop or even more importantly in forward control. This calibration usually takes the form of a…
Planets Around Low-Mass Stars (PALMS). VI. Discovery of a Remarkably Red Planetary-Mass Companion to the AB Dor Moving Group Candidate 2MASS J22362452+4751425
Brendan Bowler, Michael Liu, Dimitri Mawet +11
We report the discovery of an extremely red planetary-mass companion to 2MASS J22362452+4751425, a 0.6 late-K dwarf likely belonging to the 120 Myr AB Do…
The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: photometric characterization of anisoplanatic PSFs and testing of PSF-Reconstruction via AIROPA
Nils Rundquist, Shelley A. Wright, Matthias Schoeck +16
The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is a first-light instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) that will be used to sample the corrected adaptive optics field by the Nar…
Automating Inference of Binary Microlensing Events with Neural Density Estimation
Keming Zhang, Joshua S. Bloom, B. Scott Gaudi +3
Automated inference of binary microlensing events with traditional sampling-based algorithms such as MCMC has been hampered by the slowness of the physical forward model and the pa…
Observational constraints on the formation and evolution of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster with Keck and Gemini
Tuan Do, Andrea Ghez, Mark Morris +7
Due to its proximity, the Milky Way nuclear star cluster provides us with a wealth of data not available in other galactic nuclei. In particular, with adaptive optics, we can obser…
Disks in the Arches cluster -- survival in a starburst environment
Andrea Stolte, Mark Morris, Andrea Ghez +6
Deep Keck/NIRC2 HK'L' observations of the Arches cluster near the Galactic center reveal a significant population of near-infrared excess sources. We combine the L'-band excess obs…
Expanding the SPISEA Stellar Population Synthesis Software to the Substellar Regime
Caitlin Begbie, Rachel Street, Katarzyna Kruszynska +4
The paper extends the SPISEA stellar population synthesis software to include brown dwarfs, providing updated substellar initial mass functions, atmospheric models, and evolutionar…
`imaka - a ground-layer adaptive optics system on Maunakea
Mark Chun, Olivier Lai, Douglas Toomey +12
We present the integration status for `imaka, the ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) system on the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii. This wide-field GL…