Seeing Clearly - How the New Technology of Adaptive Optics is Transforming Ground-Based Optical Astronomy (Karl W. Kamper Memorial Lecture)

Technological advances in electro-optics, lasers and computing now make it possible for ground-based telescopes to reduce, and in some cases practically eliminate, the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere. This allows many ground-based telescopes to match or even surpass the resolution achieved by space facilities. Current 8 metre class telescopes achieve a 50-fold improvement, enabling new scientific breakthroughs ranging from direct imaging of extra-solar planets to probing the strong gravitational fields of supermassive black holes in galaxies.

The next generation of 20 - 40 meter telescopes will incorporate adaptive optics as an integral part of the facility. In fact, the technology is essential to achieve full scientific potential. The milli-arcsecond resolution that adaptive optics provides will also increase the sensitivity of the telescopes by as much as four orders of magnitude. These gains will open up entirely new scientific frontiers that are now beginning to be charted. Canadian scientists and engineers are playing leading roles in this enterprise, both in designing and building adaptive optics systems, and in exploiting them scientifically.

My talk will explore the different types of astronomical adaptive optics systems and explain how they produce such dramatic improvements in telescope performance. I will illustrate this with some recent scientific results, and examples of work underway in Canada in connection with the Thirty Meter Telescope project.