Bibcode
Monnier, John D.; Ireland, Michael; Kraus, Stefan; Alonso-Herrero, Almudena; Bonsor, Amy; Baron, Fabien; Bayo, Amelia; Berger, Jean-Philippe; Boyajian, Tabetha; Chiavassa, Andrea; Ciardi, David; Creech-Eakman, Michelle; de Wit, Willem-Jan; Defrère, Denis; Dong, Ruobing; Duchêne, Gaspard; Espaillat, Catherine; Gallenne, Alexandre; Gandhi, Poshak; Gonzalez, Jean-Francois; Haniff, Chris; Hoenig, Sebastian; Ilee, John; Isella, Andrea; Jensen, Eric; Juhasz, Attila; Kane, Stephen; Kishimoto, Makoto; Kley, Wilhelm; Kral, Quentin; Kratter, Kaitlin; Labadie, Lucas; Lacour, Sylvestre; Laughlin, Greg; Le Bouquin, Jean-Baptiste; Michael, Ernest; Meru, Farzana; Millan-Gabet, Rafael; Millour, Florentin; Minardi, Stefano; Morbidelli, Alessandro; Mordasini, Chris; Morlok, Andreas; Mozurkewich, Dave; Nelson, Richard; Olofsson, Johan; Oudmaijer, Rene; Packham, Chris; Paladini, Claudia; Panic, Olja; Petrov, Romain; Pope, Benjamin; Pott, Joerg-Uwe; Quiroga-Nunez, Luis Henry; Ramos Almeida, Cristina; Raymond, Sean N.; Regaly, Zsolt; Reynolds, Mark; Ridgway, Stephen; Rinehart, Stephen; Schreiber, Matthias; Smith, Michael; Stassun, Keivan; Surdej, Jean; ten Brummelaar, Theo; Tristram, Konrad; Turner, Neal; Tuthill, Peter; van Belle, Gerard; Vasisht, Gautum; Wallace, Alexander; Weigelt, Gerd; Wishnow, Edward; Wittkowski, Markus; Wolf, Sebastian; Young, John; Zhao, Ming; Zhu, Zhaohuan; Zúñiga-Fernández, Sebastian
Bibliographical reference
Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 10701, id. 1070118 17 pp. (2018).
Advertised on:
7
2018
Citations
1
Refereed citations
1
Description
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) is a near- and mid-infrared
interferometer project with the driving science goal of imaging directly
the key stages of planet formation, including the young proto-planets
themselves. Here, we will present an update on the work of the Science
Working Group (SWG), including new simulations of dust structures during
the assembly phase of planet formation and quantitative detection
efficiencies for accreting and non-accreting young exoplanets as a
function of mass and age. We use these results to motivate two reference
PFI designs consisting of a) twelve 3m telescopes with a maximum
baseline of 1.2km focused on young exoplanet imaging and b) twelve 8m
telescopes optimized for a wider range of young exoplanets and
protoplanetary disk imaging out to the 150K H2O ice line.
Armed with 4 x 8m telescopes, the ESO/VLTI can already detect young
exoplanets in principle and projects such as MATISSE, Hi-5 and Heimdallr
are important PFI pathfinders to make this possible. We also discuss the
state of technology development needed to make PFI more affordable,
including progress towards new designs for inexpensive, small
field-of-view, large aperture telescopes and prospects for Cubesat-based
space interferometry.