Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2018

21 MARCH-APRIL 2018 SPACE CHRONICLES Millikan postdoctoral fellow at Cal- tech about a decade ago. Because NIRES will be on the tele- scope at all times, its specialty will be capturing Targets of Opportu- nity (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, as- tronomers around the world de- tected 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’ as- tronomy,” said Soifer. “NIRES does not have to be taken off of the tele- scope, so it can respond very quickly to transient phenomena. Astrono- mers 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 hap- pened just after the Big Bang. “NIRES is yet an- other revolutionary Keck Observatory instrument developed by Keith and Tom; they built our very first instrument, NIRC, which was so sensitive it could detect the equiva- lent of a single candle flame on the Moon,” said Lewis. “Keith and Tom also developed its succes- sor, NIRC2, and Keith was key to the success of MOSFIRE. They are instru- mentation pioneers, and we are grateful to them and the entire NIRES team for helping Keck Obser- vatory continue to ad- vance our technological capabilities.” N IRES 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. [W. M. Keck Observatory] ment’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 se- vere.” Matthews devel- oped the instrument with the help of Tom Soifer, the Harold Brown Profes- sor 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 Astro- physics Professor Dae-Sik Moon, who is also associ- ated with Dunlap Insti- tute, and started working on NIRES with Matthews and Soifer when he was a N IRES 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. !