Anthony Boccaletti – Observations of exoplanetary systems at high angular resolution and high contrast: from ground to space

Speaker : Anthony Boccaletti (LESIA)

Title: Observations of exoplanetary systems at high angular resolution and high contrast: from ground to space

The two-last decade advances in exoplanetary science have been strongly connected to technological breakthroughs, especially in high contrast imaging. The past few years have witnessed a revolution in the field with the implementation of specialized ground-based instruments, like SPHERE at the VLT, equipped with extreme adaptive optics, stellar coronagraphs and dedicated post-processing algorithms. A new revolution is now coming with the James Webb Space Telescope being commissioned, expecting the first science programs to start in a few months.

I’ll briefly summarize the main results obtained with SPHERE in the first years of operations in what concern exoplanets and exoplanetary systems at large. I will focus on two systems which I studied in more details from a disk science point of view, AU Microscopii and AB Aurigae. To push even further the performances of SPHERE we are considering an upgrade of the AO system to explore the very close-in regions around bright stars and to access faint and red targets yet unattainable in star-forming regions, reinforcing the synergy with ALMA. I’ll discuss the main modifications of the instrument and the science cases associated with that upgrade. Finally, I’ll present the coronagraphic system of the Webb’s Mid IR instrument, MIRI, and the expected performance in terms of contrast and the complementarity with SPHERE.