Exozodiacal dust is warm or hot dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems orbiting main sequence stars, in or around their habitable zones. The dust can be the most luminous component of extrasolar planetary systems, but predominantly emits in the near- to mid-infrared where it is outshone by the host star. Interferometry provides a unique method of separating this dusty emission from the stellar emission. The visitor instrument PIONIER at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has been used to search for hot exozodiacal dust around a large sample of nearby main sequence stars. The results of this survey are summarised: 9 out of 85 stars show excess exozodiacal emission over the stellar photospheric emission.
@article{arxiv.1502.05781,
title = {An Unbiased Near-infrared Interferometric Survey for Hot Exozodiacal Dust},
author = {Steve Ertel and Jean-Charles Augereau and Olivier Absil and Denis Defrère and Jean-Baptiste LeBouquin and Lindsay Marion and Amy Bonsor and Jérémy Lebreton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.05781},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Invited review of our paper (Ertel et al., 2014) for ESO's The Messenger, issue 159. Final version as published in The Messenger