Astronomical Science with Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics: A Brief Review, a Current Snapshot, and a Bright Future

We briefly discuss the past, present, and future state of astronomical science with laser guide star adaptive optics (LGS AO). We present a tabulation of refereed science papers from LGS AO, amounting to a total of 23 publications as of May 2006. The first decade of LGS AO science (1995–2004) was marked by modest science productivity (≈1 paper/year), as LGS systems were being implemented and commissioned. The last two years have seen explosive science growth (≈1 paper/month), largely due to the new LGS system on the Keck II 10meter telescope, and point to an exciting new era for high angular resolution science. To illustrate the achievable on-sky performance, we present an extensive collection of Keck LGS performance measurements from the first year of our brown dwarf near-IR imaging survey. We summarize the current strengths and weaknesses of LGS compared to Hubble Space Telescope, offer a list of desired improvements, and look forward to a bright future for LGS given its wide-scale implementation on large ground-based telescopes.