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THE VYSOS PROJECT
Project Investigators: Bo Reipurth, Martin Paegert, Josh Walawender
Summary
The VYSOS project aims at surveying all the major star forming regions
all across the entire northern and southern sky for variable young
stars. Two small survey telescopes have been purchased and provide
large area shallow observations, and two larger telescopes allow
deeper more detailed observations. All observations are done
robotically.Astrobiology Roadmap Objectives:
Project Progress
As in previous years, my major effort during the past year continues to be the preparation of the VYSOS project. VYSOS (Variable Young Stellar Objects Survey) consists of a 20 inch telescopes, to be mounted in October 2008 in Hawaii at Mauna Loa and a 16 inch telescope already mounted in Chile at Cerro Armazones. The northern telescope is owned and operated by me, and the southern telescope is owned and operated by Rolf Chini, a colleague at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum in Germany. The goal of our project is to have these two fully robotic telescopes monitor all star forming regions along the entire Galactic plane within about 2 kpc in order to understand the photometric variability of solar-like young stars. Such variability can have a number of causes, mainly accretion activity, starspots, eclipses by companions or dustclouds, and magnetic reconnection events. Almost nothing is known about the timescales and amplitudes of these phenomena, and the VYSOS project will put this on a firm footing by monitoring many tens of thousands of young low-mass stars over the next decade or more.
To survey larger swaths of the sky, we have installed a 135 mm apochromatic refractor at the Mauna Loa Observatory (Figures 1 and 2). It has a 2.9 × 2.9 degree field and can reach 17th magnitude in 5 min exposures (Figure 3). We are currently performing surveys of large areas of the Milky Way with this telescope, together with a similar survey done by a 150 mm refractor installed at our site in Chile. These small but highly efficient telescopes will also be used for monitoring bright comets as they enter the inner Solar System.
Our UHNAI postdoc Martin Paegert from Germany, who started in October 2007, is focusing on the detection of extrasolar planets through transits observed with the VYSOS telescopes. He is very capable with software, and is in charge of developing the extraction techniques needed to find the transiting planets among millions of light curves.
The VYSOS 135mm apochromatic refractor in its dome at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.The dome of the 135mm refractor at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.The well known North America Nebula is a rich star forming regions in Cygnus, which contains thousands of young stars. The image gives an example of the data that the VYSOS 135mm survey telescope provides. More detailed follow-up observations are done by the larger VYSOS telescopes.
- HANDBOOK OF STAR FORMING REGIONS
- A Rare low mass quadruple spectroscopic AND eclipsing binary
- A search for Main Belt Comets in Pan-STARRS 1
- A search for primordial water from deep in the Earth's mantle
- A spectroscopically unique Main Belt asteroid: 10537 (1991 RY16)
- A Supertree Analysis of the Metazoan Phylogeny
- Acquisition and Installation of a new Cameca ims 1280 ion microprobe
- Acquisition and Installation of Witec Confocal Raman microscope scanning system
- Amorphization of Crystalline Water Ice in the Solar System
- Assessing the likelihood of supernova impact of protoplanetary disks
- Carbonate Lithologies on Devon Island, Canada
- Chemistry and biology of ultramafic-hosted alkaline springs
- Chemistry of the NH3/H2O system
- DIVERSITY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY OF THE UNIQUE TROPICAL PHYLUM PLACOZOA
- Dynamical Evolution of Astroid Belt and the Parent Bodies of Iron Meteorites
- Ecology of a Hawaiian lava cave microbial mat
- FMARS Long Duration Mission: a simulation of manned Mars exploration in an analogue environment, Devon Island, Canada
- Formation and Detection of Hot-Earth Objects in Systems with Close-in Jupiters
- Formation and the Prospects of the Detection of Habitable Planets in Extreme Planetary Systems
- Formation of Molecular Hydrogen via Interaction of Ionizing Radiation with Hydrocarbon Ices in the Interstellar Medium
- Formation of Planetesimals in a Dynamically Evolving Nebula
- FU ORIONIS ERUPTIONS
- Ice Ages on Mars
- Ice at the Mars Phoenix Landing Site
- Ice on Main Belt Comets
- Icelandic subglacial lakes
- Mechanisms of Marine Microbial Community Structuring
- Mechanistical Studies on the Non-Equilibrium Chemistry of Unusual Carbon Oxide in Solar System Ices
- Modeling grain surface reaction pathways for large organic molecules
- Molecular Deuteration on grain surfaces
- NEWBORN BINARIES
- Observations and Models of comet 17P/Holmes
- Origin and Activation Mechanism of Main Belt Comets
- Origin of Irregular Satellites
- Recovery of comet 85P/Boethin for the Deep Impact Extended Mission
- Sediment-buried basement deep biosphere
- Serpentinazation and abiogenic methane in the Mariana Forearc
- Sleeping through the Arctic Martian Sol
- Spectropolarimetric studies of stars with hot jupiters
- TES study of intracrater low albedo deposits, Amazonis Planitia, Mars
- The delivery of short-lived radionucleides to the solar system
- The effect of lunar-like satellites on the orbital infrared lightcurves of Earth-analog planets
- The Main Belt distribution of basaltic asteroids
- The Size Distribution of Small KBOs
- THE VYSOS PROJECT
- Ultra-violet processing of ices in the Rosette Nebula
- Unveiling the evolution and interplay of ice and gas in quiescent clouds
- Variable Young Stellar Objects Survey (VYSOS)
- Water on Mars
- X-ray- and UV-bright low-mass stars in the solar neighborhood