Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility for time domain astronomy in 2020+

Abstract

The robotic 2m Liverpool Telescope, based on the Canary island of La Palma, has a diverse instrument suite and a strong track record in time domain science, with highlights including early time photometry and spectra of supernovae, measurements of the polarization of gamma-ray burst afterglows, and high cadence light curves of transiting extrasolar planets. In the next decade the time domain will become an increasingly prominent part of the astronomical agenda with new facilities such as LSST, SKA, CTA and Gaia, and promised detections of astrophysical gravitational wave and neutrino sources opening new windows on the transient universe. To capitalise on this exciting new era we intend to build Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility on La Palma dedicated to time domain science. The next generation of survey facilities will discover large numbers of new transient sources, but there will be a pressing need for follow-up observations for scientific exploitation, in particular spectroscopic follow-up. Liverpool Telescope 2 will have a 4-metre aperture, enabling optical/infrared spectroscopy of faint objects. Robotic telescopes are capable of rapid reaction to unpredictable phenomena, and for fast-fading transients like gamma-ray burst afterglows. This rapid reaction enables observations which would be impossible on less agile telescopes of much larger aperture. We intend Liverpool Telescope 2 to have a world-leading response time, with the aim that we will be taking data with a few tens of seconds of receipt of a trigger from a ground- or space-based transient detection facility. We outline here our scientific goals and present the results of our preliminary optical design studies.

12 pages with 5 figures and 1 table, presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 9145 (Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes V), to be published as paper 9145-36 in SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014 Proceedings

References in corpus (8)

• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
• The type Ia supernova SNLS-03D3bb from a super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf star
• The ultra-long Gamma-Ray Burst 111209A: the collapse of a blue supergiant?
• Ten per cent polarized optical emission from GRB 090102
• Early Optical Polarization of a Gamma Ray Burst Afterglow
• Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility for rapid transient follow-up

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility for rapid transient follow-up