Adaptive Optics for Astronomy

Abstract

Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based telescopes to reach the diffraction limit and thus providing spatial resolution superior to that achievable from space with current or planned satellites. In this review we consider adaptive optics from the astrophysical perspective. We show that adaptive optics has led to important advances in our understanding of a multitude of astrophysical processes, and describe how the requirements from science applications are now driving the development of the next generation of novel adaptive optics techniques.

to appear in ARA&A vol 50, 2012

References in corpus (36)

• Direct Imaging of Multiple Planets Orbiting the Star HR 8799
• From rings to bulges: evidence for rapid secular galaxy evolution at z~2 from integral field spectroscopy in the SINS survey
• The rapid formation a large rotating disk galaxy three billion years after the Big Bang
• A Close Look at Star Formation around Active Galactic Nuclei
• The bulk of the black hole growth since z~1 occurs in a secular universe: No major merger-AGN connection
• The Gemini Deep Planet Survey -- GDPS
• LkCa 15: A Young Exoplanet Caught at Formation?
• Resolving the complex structure of the dust torus in the active nucleus of the Circinus galaxy
• The Role of Multiplicity in Disk Evolution and Planet Formation
• Lucky Imaging: High Angular Resolution Imaging in the Visible from the Ground
• The black hole mass -- stellar velocity dispersion correlation: bulges versus pseudobulges
• The Palomar/Keck Adaptive Optics Survey of Young Solar Analogs: Evidence for a Universal Companion Mass Function
• The Star-Forming Torus and Stellar Dynamical Black Hole Mass in the Seyfert 1 Nucleus of NGC3227
• Resolving the obscuring torus in NGC 1068 with the power of infrared interferometry: Revealing the inner funnel of dust
• The Initial Mass Function of the Massive Star-forming Region NGC 3603 from Near-Infrared Adaptive Optics observations
• Mapping of the molecular gas inflow towards the Seyfert nucleus of NGC4051 using Gemini NIFS
• The formation and assembly of a typical star-forming galaxy at z~3
• A novel L-band imaging search for giant planets in the Tucana and Beta Pictoris moving groups
• The Wide Brown Dwarf Binary Oph 1622-2405 and Discovery of A Wide, Low Mass Binary in Ophiuchus (Oph 1623-2402): A New Class of Young Evaporating Wide Binaries?
• Nuclear spirals as feeding channels to the Supermassive Black Hole: the case of the galaxy NGC 6951
• Multiple protostellar systems. II. A high resolution near-infrared imaging survey in nearby star-forming regions
• The Evolution of the Multiplicity of Embedded Protostars I: Sample Properties and Binary Detections
• Streaming Motions Towards the Supermassive Black Hole in NGC 1097
• Probing the near infrared stellar population of Seyfert galaxies
• The zCOSMOS-SINFONI Project I: Sample Selection and Natural-Seeing Observations
• Near Infrared Adaptive Optics Imaging of QSO Host Galaxies
• The proper motion of the Arches cluster with Keck Laser-Guide Star Adaptive Optics
• AGN-Starburst connection in NGC7582: Gemini near-infrared spectrograph integral field unit observations
• Very high contrast IFU spectroscopy of AB Doradus C: 9 mag contrast at 0.2" without a coronagraph using spectral deconvolution
• The Star Formation Histories of the Bulge and Disk of M31 from Gemini North+NIRI/Altair and HST/NICMOS
• Angular Momemtum of Binary Asteroids: Implication for their possible origin
• Mass of the Southern Black Hole in NGC 6240 from Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics
• The Anisoplanatic Point Spread Function in Adaptive Optics
• Resolving the nucleus of Centaurus A at mid-IR wavelengths
• Adaptive Optics: Observations and Prospects for Studies of Active Galactic Nuclei
• High Resolution Observations using Adaptive Optics: Achievements and Future Needs

Cited by in corpus (68)

• Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies
• Nuclear Star Clusters
• Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets
• The SINS/zC-SINF survey of z~2 galaxy kinematics: SINFONI adaptive optics-assisted data and kiloparsec-scale emission line properties
• PALM-3000: Exoplanet Adaptive Optics for the 5-meter Hale Telescope
• DYNAMO I: A Sample of Ha-Luminous Galaxies with Resolved Kinematics
• The Dawes Review 1: Kinematic studies of star-forming galaxies across cosmic time
• SPHERE / ZIMPOL high resolution polarimetric imager. I. System overview, PSF parameters, coronagraphy, and polarimetry
• Instrumentation for the detection and characterization of exoplanets
• High-efficiency Autonomous Laser Adaptive Optics
• An all-photonic focal-plane wavefront sensor
• Physics-based model of the adaptive-optics corrected point-spread-function
• Influence of Stellar Multiplicity On Planet Formation. IV. Adaptive Optics Imaging of Kepler Stars With Multiple Transiting Planet Candidates
• Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes
• Improving Planet-Finding Spectrometers
• A treatment procedure for Gemini North/NIFS data cubes: application to NGC 4151
• Tracking moving objects through scattering media via speckle correlations
• Electrically reconfigurable phase-change transmissive metasurface
• Stochastic Optics: A Scattering Mitigation Framework for Radio Interferometric Imaging
• A treatment procedure for VLT/SINFONI data cubes: application to NGC 5643
• Ultra-deep GEMINI near-infrared observations of the bulge globular cluster NGC 6624
• A Demonstration of Wavefront Sensing and Mirror Phasing from the Image Domain
• The future of astronomy with small satellites
• Exoplanets with ELT-METIS I: Estimating the direct imaging exoplanet yield around stars within 6.5 parsecs
• Towards Precision Photometry with Extremely Large Telescopes: the Double Subgiant Branch of NGC 1851
• MICADO: first light imager for the E-ELT
• Point spread function modelling for astronomical telescopes: a review focused on weak gravitational lensing studies
• High spatial resolution optical imaging of the multiple T Tauri system LkHα 262/LkHα 263
• Phase correction for ALMA - Investigating water vapour radiometer scaling:The long-baseline science verification data case study
• Single conjugate adaptive optics for the ELT instrument METIS
• Astronomical photonics in the context of infrared interferometry and high-resolution spectroscopy
• On the comparison between MASS and G-SCIDAR techniques
• Impact of climate change on site characteristics of eight major astronomical observatories using high-resolution global climate projections until 2050
• The Proper Motion of Pyxis: the first use of Adaptive Optics in tandem with HST on a faint halo object
• Massive High-Redshift Quiescent Galaxies With JWST
• The Role of AGN in Luminous Infrared Galaxies from the Multiwavelength Perspective
• Predicting the Observability of Population III Stars with ELT-HARMONI via the Helium $1640\mathring{\mathrm{A}}$ emission line
• Extrapolated speckle-correlation imaging
• Astrometry in two-photon interferometry using Earth rotation fringe scan
• Artificial neural networks for centroiding elongated spots in Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors
• Optimal stellar photometry for multi-conjugate adaptive optics systems using science-based metrics
• SFADI: the Speckle-Free Angular Differential Imaging method
• Detection and Implications of Laser-Induced Raman Scattering at Astronomical Observatories
• Improved prior for adaptive optics point spread function estimation from science images: Application for deconvolution
• Multiresolution angular momentum measurements of z~1.5-2 star-forming galaxies
• Solar image quality assessment: a proof of concept using Variance of Laplacian method and its application to optical atmospheric condition monitoring
• All-fibre wavefront sensor
• A Practical Deconvolution Computation Algorithm to Extract 1D Spectra from 2D Images of Optical Fiber Spectroscopy
• DanceCam: atmospheric turbulence mitigation in wide-field astronomical images with short-exposure video streams
• The Chandra Deep Field South as a test case for Global Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics
• Discovery of an M-type Companion to the Herbig Ae Star V1787 Ori
• Long-term 4.6$\mu$m Variability in Brown Dwarfs and a New Technique for Identifying Brown Dwarf Binary Candidates
• MAD Adaptive Optics Imaging of High Luminosity Quasars: A Pilot Project
• Reference Optical Turbulence and Wind Profiles for Single Conjugate and Extreme Adaptive Optics
• A low-steering piezo-driven mirror
• Evaluating the GeoSnap 13-$\mu$m Cut-Off HgCdTe Detector for mid-IR ground-based astronomy
• Metasurface Enhanced Spatial Mode Decomposition
• Advances in control of a Pyramid Single Conjugate Adaptive Optics system
• A Shallow Slope for the Stellar Mass--Angular Momentum Relation of Star-Forming Galaxies at $1.5<z<2.5$
• Laser-only adaptive optics achieves significant image quality gains compared to seeing-limited observations over the entire sky
• Towards high-resolution astronomical imaging
• Multi-parameter study for a new Ground-Based telescope in Egypt
• Astrophotonics -- current capabilities and the road ahead
• Light Propagation through Space-Time Non-Markovian Random Media
• PSF-based Analysis for Detecting Unresolved Wide Binaries
• Wavefront sensing from the image domain with the Oxford-SWIFT integral field spectrograph
• A 5kHz modulator for pyramid wavefront sensors
• Focal-plane wavefront sensing with moderately broadband light using a short multi-mode fiber