We report on initial results from the largest infrared AO direct imaging survey searching for wide orbit (>100 AU) massive exoplanets and brown dwarfs as companions around young nearby stars using Robo-AO at the 2.1-m telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona. The occurrence rates of these rare substellar companions are critical to furthering our understanding of the origin of planetary-mass companions on wide orbits. The observing efficiency of Robo-AO allows us to conduct a survey an order of magnitude larger than previously possible. We commissioned a low-noise high-speed SAPHIRA near-infrared camera to conduct this survey and report on its sensitivity, performance, and data reduction process.
@article{arxiv.1807.05291,
title = {LASSO: Large Adaptive optics Survey for Substellar Objects using the new SAPHIRA detector on Robo-AO},
author = {Maissa Salama and James Ou and Christoph Baranec and Michael C. Liu and Brendan P. Bowler and Reed Riddle and Dmitry Duev and Donald Hall and Dani Atkinson and Sean Goebel and Mark Chun and Shane Jacobson and Charles Lockhart and Eric Warmbier and Shrinivas Kulkarni and Nicholas M. Law},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.05291},
year = {2018}
}