NIRES
arrived at Keck Observatory from Caltech on April 17 and was installed
on Keck II on September 28. This long-awaited instrument is perfectly
suited for time domain astronomy follow-up observations of targets
identified by new surveys that are designed to find transients and
exotic objects. Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory
NIRES Principal Investigator Keith Matthews of
Caltech (left) with W. M. Keck Observatory Director Hilton Lewis (right)
after successfully achieving “first light” with a spectral image of
planetary nebula NGC 7027.
Credit: W.M. Keck
Observatory
Left to right: Keck Observatory Director Hilton Lewis, NIRES Principal
Investigator Keith Matthews of Caltech, and Keck Observatory Senior
Software Engineer Kevin Tsubota celebrated with a toast alongside the
entire NIRES team after achieving first light. Credit: W.M. Keck
Observatory
Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer Designed to Find the Faintest, Most Violent Objects in the Universe
Maunakea,
Hawaii – Astronomers at W. M. Keck
Observatory have successfully met a major milestone after capturing the very
first science data from Keck Observatory’s newest instrument, the Caltech-built
Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer (NIRES).
The
Keck Observatory-Caltech NIRES team just completed the instrument’s first set
of commissioning observations and achieved “first light” with a spectral image
of the planetary nebula NGC 7027.
“The
Keck Observatory continually strives to provide instrumentation that meets the
high aspirations of our scientific community and responds to changing
scientific needs,” said Keck Observatory Director Hilton Lewis. “NIRES is
expected to be one of the most efficient single-object, near-infrared
spectrographs on an eight to ten-meter telescope, designed to study explosive,
deep sky phenomena such as supernovae and gamma ray bursts, a capability that
is in high demand.”
“The
power of NIRES is that it can cover a whole spectral range simultaneously with
one observation,” said Keith Matthews, the instrument’s principal investigator
and a chief instrument scientist at Caltech. “It’s a cross-dispersed
spectrograph that works in the infrared from where the visual cuts off out to
2.4 microns where the background from the thermal emission gets severe.”
Matthews
developed the instrument with the help of Tom Soifer, the Harold Brown Professor
of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech and member of the Keck Observatory Board of
Directors, Jason Melbourne, a former postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, and University
of Toronto Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor Dae-Sik Moon, who
is also associated with Dunlap Institute, and started working on
NIRES with Matthews and Soifer when he was a Millikan postdoctoral fellow
at Caltech about a decade ago.
Because
NIRES will be on the telescope at all times, its specialty will be capturing
Targets of Opportunity (ToO) – astronomical objects that unexpectedly go ‘boom.’
This capability is now more important than ever, especially with the recent discovery,
announced October 16, of gravitational waves caused by the collision of two
neutron stars. For the first time in history, astronomers around the world detected
both light and gravitational waves of this event, triggering a new era in
astronomy.
“NIRES
will be very useful in this new field of ‘multi-messenger’ astronomy,” said
Soifer. “NIRES does not have to be taken off of the telescope, so it can
respond very quickly to transient phenomena. Astronomers can easily turn NIRES
to the event and literally use it within a moment’s notice.”
With
its high-sensitivity, NIRES will also allow astronomers to observe extremely
faint objects found with the Spitzer and WISE infrared space telescopes. Such
ancient objects, like high-redshift galaxies and quasars, can give clues about what
happened just after the Big Bang.
“NIRES
is yet another revolutionary Keck Observatory instrument developed by
Keith and
Tom; they built our very first instrument, NIRC, which was so sensitive
it
could detect the equivalent of a single candle flame on the Moon,” said
Lewis. “Keith
and Tom also developed its successor, NIRC2, and Keith was key to the
success
of MOSFIRE. They are instrumentation pioneers, and we are grateful to
them and the entire NIRES team for helping Keck Observatory continue to
advance our technological
capabilities.”
NIRES
arrived at Keck Observatory in April. It will be available to the Keck
Observatory science community in February.
Media Contact:
Mari-Ela Chock,
Communications Officer
(808) 554-0567
mchock@keck.hawaii.edu
Media Contact:
Mari-Ela Chock,
Communications Officer
(808) 554-0567
mchock@keck.hawaii.edu
Source: W. M. Keck Observatory
