Choisissez le fuseau horaire
Le fuseau horaire de votre profil:
Description
Adaptive optics plays a fundamental role in modern astronomy as it allows to perform high-resolution astrophysical observations from ground-based telescopes, which otherwise would be severely limited by the effects of the atmospheric turbulence. For example, adaptive optics has made possible the direct imaging of exoplanets and the precise determination of stellar orbits around a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way.
An adaptive optics system requires a bright source of light in space that serves as a reference to measure the wavefront aberrations in the optical path towards the telescope. Because there are not sufficiently bright stars available in the sky, we create a laser beacon in the sodium layer at 95 km altitude which we called a laser guide star. Using laser guide stars significantly increase the sky coverage of adaptive optics system, although it also show a few important drawbacks.
In this talk I will guide you through the principles of adaptive optics and laser guide stars, the development of technology up to present days, and the directions of research that we are currently exploring to overcome the limitations of laser guide stars in view of the challenging applications for the future extremely large telescopes and satellite optical communications.
Contact
