MacroCosmos mars-avril 2018

21 MARS-AVRIL 2018 CHRONIQUES DE L'ESPACE Millikan postdoctoral fellow at Cal- tech about a decade ago. Because NIRES will be on the teles- cope at all times, its specialty will be capturing Targets of Opportunity (ToO) – astronomical objects that unexpectedly go ‘boom.’ This capa- bility is now more important than ever, especially with the recent dis- covery, announced October 16, of gravitational waves caused by the collision of two neutron stars. For the first time in history, astrono- mers 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’ as- tronomy,” said Soifer. “NIRES does not have to be taken off of the te- lescope, so it can respond very quickly to transient phenomena. As- trono-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 happe- ned just after the Big Bang. “NIRES is yet ano- ther 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 develo- ped 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 Astrophy- sics Professor Dae-Sik Moon, who is also asso- ciated 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. !