PROMPT Telescopes

Purposes

Originally built to observe gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – deaths of massive stars and births of black holes – simultaneously at multiple wavelengths when only tens of seconds old, PROMPT and its mission have both expanded significantly. PROMPT, and increasingly all of Skynet’s telescopes, now serve a rapidly growing, state, national, and international user community as a broad-based facility for small-telescope science.

In addition to being used to study GRBs, PROMPT and the other Skynet telescopes, often in campaigns with other optical and radio telescopes around the world, and also with space telescopes, are being used to study blazars, supernovae (SNe), novae, pulsating white dwarfs, a wide variety of variable stars, eclipsing binaries, exoplanetary systems, trans-Neptunian objects and Centaurs, asteroids, and near-Earth objects (NEOs). The largest of these efforts has been the CHilean Automated Supernova sEarch (CHASE). To date, Skynet has discovered 205 SNe, including at least 65 Type Ia SNe, which are used to measure Hubble’s constant and to calibrate cosmic acceleration. Skynet has also observed 76 GRBs within 15 – 70 seconds (90% range) of spacecraft notification, detecting 44 optical afterglows on this timescale. Skynet is also the leading tracker of NEOs in the southern hemisphere.

History

Over the past nine years, but mostly over the past 4 – 5 years, Skynet observations have resulted in 56 journal articles, including three in Nature (2006, 2010, 2014) and one in Science (2014), with another approximately dozen submitted or in preparation across the network. Skynet data played the primary role in over half of these publications, and a key supporting role in most of the rest. This year, our publication rate doubled, to one journal article every 19 days, reflecting integration into Skynet of our new facilities. We expect this rate to increase further as we continue this process of integration over the next year. Additionally, we have published three conference proceedings, nearly 350 observing reports (CBET, GCN, ATel, IAUC, MPBu, MPC, MPEC), two doctoral dissertations, at least six masters theses, and at least five undergraduate honors theses.

Furthermore, these publications have been of increasingly high impact, now resulting in over 1,200 citations, with nearly 1,000 of these in refereed publications. Nor do most of these citations stem from but a few publications: Skynet’s H index is currently 21 and increasing at a rate of ≈4/year. Again, we expect this rate to increase further as we continue to integrate our new facilities into Skynet, and as the effect of our increased publication rate is felt.

We have achieved the impact that we have had so far by seeking out, or taking advantage of when sought out, high-impact partnerships, to make greatest use of time when no sufficiently bright GRB is observable, which is approximately 85% of the time. In most cases, this is done at no cost to the partner. In some cases, we have been able to garner private sponsorship of these partnerships, from the Robert Martin Ayers Science Fund. Finally, we have reached agreements with some of our larger partners to help offset site fees and routine maintenance costs, which, as of this year, we are now doing sustainably.

When no sufficiently bright GRBs are observable, PROMPT is used by professional astronomers, students of all ages – graduate through elementary – and members of the general public across North Carolina, the United States, and the world for a wide array of research, research training, and EPE efforts.

PROMPT Collaboration institutions include (1) UNC-CH, (2) 13 regional undergraduate institutions, including three minority-serving institutions (Appalachian State University, Elon University, Fayetteville State University, Guilford College, Guilford Technical Community College, Hampden-Sydney College, High Point University, NC A & T State University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Greensboro, UNC-Pembroke, and Western Carolina University), (3) UNC-CH’s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center (MPSC), and (4) other institutions that we have partnered with to produce additional high-impact, small-telescope science. PROMPT Collaboration access began on February 1, 2006, only a year and a half after receiving initial funding, and to date these four groups have used 12,801, 13,818, 7,969, and 29,586 hours of observing time, respectively.

Skynet’s EPE efforts include:

“I am so excited to have parents coming up and thanking me for doing all this. Their kids are up late at night checking images, calling them into the room to see and IM-ing their friends to check out their images. Parents are excited to see their children take such an interest in an academic topic.” – Ben Davis, Teacher, Albemarle High School, NC

“I can’t thank you enough on behalf of Enloe’s astronomy classes for the amazing work your team has put into the OBSERVE program. I think Mr. Hicks choked up more than one time at the fact that high school students were scrambling to their computers the moment they woke up every morning to see how their images turned out. (:” – Jessica Bodford, Student, Enloe High School, NC

“One particular student of mine has a Behavior Improvement Plan. He has difficulty relating to any of his teachers or classmates, or doing his class work. But using Project: OBSERVE, finding the right galaxy, learning about what was visible in the Chilean night sky, how to enter jobs, how to manipulate his rough photos, sparked an interest that no one had seen in this young man before!” – Kathy Williams, Teacher, Scotland County Schools, NC

Supported by NSF, we have been developing Skynet, which is telescope control and web-based, dynamic queue-scheduling software that we originally developed for PROMPT, but is now capable of controlling many more telescopes and most types of commercially available small-telescope hardware. This started as a proof of concept effort, to see if we could expand our geographic footprint beyond CTIO without having to pay for additional telescopes. This experiment has greatly exceeded expectations: The Skynet Robotic Telescope Network now spans four continents and soon five countries. Currently, we have ten non-PROMPT telescopes (Australia, California, Illinois, Italy, four in North Carolina, a 40-inch diameter telescope in Wisconsin, and the 20-meter diameter radio telescope in West Virginia) integrated into Skynet, and plan to add at least seven more non-PROMPT telescopes (Canada, Kansas, Illinois, two in North Carolina, including a 32-inch diameter telescope, Virginia, and Wyoming) over the next two years.

Skynet has proven to be an attractive option for non-PROMPT telescope owners because (1) they no longer need to staff their telescopes at night, or in the case of campus telescopes they no longer need to keep their students awake night after night if they want to do observational astronomy curricula, research, or research training; and (2) Skynet allows telescope owners to queue observations on the other telescopes on the network when these systems are not otherwise in use, giving them free access to different and often better telescopes, instrumentation, regions of the sky, and site and weather conditions. Skynet has now taken over 8.4 million exposures, currently at a rate of about 170,000 per month and this rate is increasing by about 4,600 per month. All Skynet observations are publicly available after one year: https://skynet.unc.edu/archive.