06-27-2018, 05:27 PM
Mella - just to answer your question about Tabby's star: The IRTF on MK has studied it in the infrared looking for debris around the star (i.e., looking for infrared emission from warm dust around the star) but found nothing significant. As for other studies, I don't think the MK observatories have played much of a part. I suspect the reason for this is the star is quite bright so there's no reason to use the large telescopes to observe it; smaller telescopes around the world are quite capable of obtaining data on the star and easier to get time on. Observing the star on the MK telescopes would take time away from observing much fainter things.
Just looking at the star's magnitude (its brightness), it would be very close to UKIRT's saturation limit, i.e., the point we couldn't observe the star because it's too bright, at least while we're in wide-field mode (which we have been for nearly two years). So it's much more sensible to use smaller telescopes elsewhere.
Just looking at the star's magnitude (its brightness), it would be very close to UKIRT's saturation limit, i.e., the point we couldn't observe the star because it's too bright, at least while we're in wide-field mode (which we have been for nearly two years). So it's much more sensible to use smaller telescopes elsewhere.