When the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) enters operational service at Cerro Amazones in Chile’s Atacama desert, scheduled for 2024, adaptive optics (AO) will be crucial to its hunt for exoplanets.
In the E-ELT – as with other advanced ground-based telescope systems – AO is needed to counteract the disturbance to incoming light caused by atmospheric turbulence, which will otherwise overwhelm the subtle optical indications of exoplanets orbiting their stars.