Image Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/Fuentes, Gemini/AURA/NSF, CFHT/Gordon Meyers, LCO.
The AEON+ Observatories Will Enable Rapid Response
Las Cumbres Observatory is pleased to announce that it has received a $2,000,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the expansion and enhancement of the Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON).
In the age of multi-messenger astronomy, gravitational wave and neutrino detections are delivering new information. Ground-breaking new time-domain sky surveys, across the electromagnetic spectrum, are revealing insights into new phenomena. Understanding the physics in the combination of multi-messenger and time-domain signals requires timely follow-up observations from a range of telescope facilities. Many of the detected phenomena are transient and often exhibit observational signatures at wavelengths over a range of timescales from minutes to years. The key observational challenge of the new era in astronomy is to enable timely follow-up observations in response to survey alerts.
The AEON collaboration of observatories was created for precisely this mission: the need to prepare US telescope facilities for the new era in astronomy. Founded as a partnership between the NSF’s Optical and Infrared Laboratory (NOIRLab), and the Gemini, Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes (SOAR) and Las Cumbres Observatories (LCO), AEON has established a technical framework and tools to enable existing observing facilities to implement responsive observing modes. Importantly, the architecture was designed to work with the minimum of changes to each observatory and to reduce the workload on staff and scientists. AEON has demonstrated the capability to enable flexible and rapid follow-up observations from several major optical facilities and its founding partners have demonstrated the success of this approach since 2019.
The new funding from the NSF will enhance the network to collaborate with additional major optical, infrared, and - for the first time - radio telescope facilities in the US. The AEON+ collaboration will become truly pan-wavelength, enabling observations to be coordinated from radio as well as major optical/infrared telescopes including the Keck Telescope, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and the Skynet network. A new software library will enable astronomers to request observations from all compatible telescope facilities. LCO will also foster closer collaborations between the operators and developers at different observatories on the ground and in space.
LCO Senior Scientist Dr. Rachel Street will be directing this work over the next two years. Dr. Street is looking forward to building the enhanced AEON+ facility and to providing the astronomical community with follow-up observations at the click of a button. Dr. Street says, “AEON+ is an exciting opportunity for time-domain astronomy. It will enable scientists to bring the full range of US astronomical instruments to bear when we discover new and transient phenomena of all kinds, and that’s going to be essential to understand Multi-Messenger events. It’s also going to be a vital resource to characterize discoveries from the NSF’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory."
LCO is grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting this vital effort in time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy.
Dr. Rachel Street of Las Cumbres Observatory is the Principal Investigator of the AEON+ project.
