Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility for rapid transient follow-up
arXiv:1410.1731 · doi:10.1007/s10686-015-9447-0
Abstract
The Liverpool Telescope is one of the world's premier facilities for time domain astronomy. The time domain landscape is set to radically change in the coming decade, with surveys such as LSST providing huge numbers of transient detections on a nightly basis; transient detections across the electromagnetic spectrum from other facilities such as SVOM, SKA and CTA; and the era of `multi-messenger astronomy', wherein events are detected via non-electromagnetic means, such as gravitational wave emission. We describe here our plans for Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic telescope designed to capitalise on this new era of time domain astronomy. LT2 will be a 4-metre class facility co-located with the LT at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos on the Canary island of La Palma. The telescope will be designed for extremely rapid response: the aim is that the telescope will take data within 30 seconds of the receipt of a trigger from another facility. The motivation for this is twofold: firstly it will make it a world-leading facility for the study of fast fading transients and explosive phenomena discovered at early times. Secondly, it will enable large-scale programmes of low-to-intermediate resolution spectral classification of transients to be performed with great efficiency. In the target-rich environment of the LSST era, minimising acquisition overheads will be key to maximising the science gains from any follow-up programme. The telescope will have a diverse instrument suite which is simultaneously mounted for automatic changes, but it is envisaged that the primary instrument will be an intermediate resolution, optical/infrared spectrograph for scientific exploitation of transients discovered with the next generation of synoptic survey facilities. In this paper we outline the core science drivers for the telescope, and the requirements for the optical and mechanical design.
53 pages including 7 figures and 1 table. Accepted by Experimental Astronomy. First revision modified in light of comments from the anonymous referee. This revision fixed some minor typographical errors introduced in the first revision
References in corpus (40)
- The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
- A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
- LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
- The death of massive stars - I. Observational constraints on the progenitors of type II-P supernovae
- The type Ia supernova SNLS-03D3bb from a super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf star
- An optical supernova associated with the X-ray flash XRF 060218
- Detection of atmospheric haze on an extrasolar planet: The 0.55 - 1.05 micron transmission spectrum of HD189733b with the Hubble Space Telescope
- A giant outburst two years before the core-collapse of a massive star
- Faint Thermonuclear Supernovae from AM Canum Venaticorum Binaries
- GROND - a 7-channel imager
- A Common Explosion Mechanism for Type Ia Supernovae
- A change in the optical polarization associated with a gamma-ray flare in the blazar 3C 279
- A neutron-star-driven X-ray flash associated with supernova SN 2006aj
- From Shock Breakout to Peak and Beyond: Extensive Panchromatic Observations of the Type Ib Supernova 2008D associated with Swift X-ray Transient 080109
- Teraelectronvolt Astronomy
- Cosmic Rays from the Knee to the Highest Energies
- Using Stellar Limb-Darkening to Refine the Properties of HD 209458b
- The metamorphosis of Supernova SN2008D/XRF080109: a link between Supernovae and GRBs/Hypernovae
- UV/Optical Detections of Candidate Tidal Disruption Events by GALEX and CFHTLS
- Strong Infrared Emission from the Extrasolar Planet HD189733b
- A New Class of Luminous Transients and A First Census of Their Massive Stellar Progenitors
- The ultra-long Gamma-Ray Burst 111209A: the collapse of a blue supergiant?
- A three-dimensional deflagration model for Type Ia supernovae confronted with observations
- GRBs as Cosmological Probes - Cosmic Chemical Evolution
- Ten per cent polarized optical emission from GRB 090102
- Supernova Shock Breakout from a Red Supergiant
- On the evolutionary status of short period cataclysmic variables
- KM3NeT: Towards a km3 Mediterranean Neutrino Telescope
- Probing Shock Breakout with Serendipitous GALEX Detections of Two SNLS Type II-P Supernovae
- Constraints on core-collapse supernova progenitors from correlations with H-alpha emission
- First detection of polarized scattered light from an exoplanetary atmosphere
- Early Optical Polarization of a Gamma Ray Burst Afterglow
- Radio precursors to neutron star binary mergings
- RISE: a fast-readout imager for exoplanet transit timing
- On the possible observational manifestation of supernova shock impact on the neutron star magnetosphere
- LSST: Comprehensive NEO Detection, Characterization, and Orbits
- Type Ia supernova science 2010-2020
- Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility for time domain astronomy in 2020+
- Probing Quiescent Massive Black Holes: Insights from Tidal Disruption Events
- Observational tests of the GAIA expected harvest on eclipsing binaries