As part of the GRAVITY+ project, the near-infrared beam combiner GRAVITY and the VLTI are currently undergoing a series of significant upgrades to further improve the performance and sky coverage. The instrumental changes will be transformational, and for instance uniquely position GRAVITY to observe the broad line region of hundreds of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) at a redshift of two and higher. The increased sky coverage is achieved by enlarging the maximum angular separation between the celestial science object (SC) and the off-axis fringe tracking (FT) star from currently 2 arcseconds (arcsec) up to unprecedented 30 arcsec, limited by the atmospheric conditions. This was successfully demonstrated at the VLTI for the first time.
@article{arxiv.2209.11602,
title = {GRAVITY+ Wide: Towards hundreds of z $\sim$ 2 AGN},
author = {A. Drescher and M. Fabricius and T. Shimizu and J. Woillez and P. Bourget and F. Widmann and J. Shangguan and C. Straubmeier and M. Horrobin and N. Schuhler and F. Eisenhauer and F. Gonté and S. Gillessen and T. Ott and G. Perrin and T. Paumard and W. Brandner and L. Kreidberg and K. Perraut and J. -B. Le Bouquin and P. Garcia and S. Hönig and D. Defrère and G. Bourdarot and H. Feuchtgruber and R. Genzel and M. Hartl and F. Haussmann and D. Lutz and N. More and C. Rau and J. Sauter and S. Uysal and P. Wessely and E. Wieprecht and L. Wimmer and S. Yazici},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.11602},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Proceeding of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2022