Résumé / Abstract Seminaire_IAP
« SPHERE on the VLT »

Anne-Marie Lagrange
Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (Grenoble, France)

Direct imaging of exoplanets orbiting a few au from their parent stars requires high contrast, very stable images provided by space telescopes or ground based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics, coronagraphs, as well as dedicated reduction algorithms. Each of these three aspects is challenging, and is the subject of active R&D. In the past decade, significant progress has been made both at "sub-system" and integrated levels, and the recently offered extreme-AO instruments on 10m class telescopes provide now unprecedented capabilities. The extreme AO SPHERE instrument installed in 2014 on the ESO/VLT is, mainly dedicated to the search for exoplanets and disks, but also to other astrophysical studies. After a brief overview of the history of high contrast direct imaging, I will describe SPHERE and present the main results obtained since its first light. I will report, in particular on the status of the SHINE GTO survey (200 nights) dedicated to the search for exoplanets. High contrast imaging is just in its infancy, and exciting projects are being developed or studied for the next decades, with the long term, extremely challenging goal of imaging and characterizing Earth twins. I will propose a possible roadmap for this objective.
vendredi 6 octobre 2017 - 11:00
Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
Page web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage