The Planet Formation Imager
Abstract
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI, www.planetformationimager.org) is a next-generation infrared interferometer array with the primary goal of imaging the active phases of planet formation in nearby star forming regions. PFI will be sensitive to warm dust emission using mid-infrared capabilities made possible by precise fringe tracking in the near-infrared. An L/M band combiner will be especially sensitive to thermal emission from young exoplanets (and their disks) with a high spectral resolution mode to probe the kinematics of CO and H2O gas. In this paper, we give an overview of the main science goals of PFI, define a baseline PFI architecture that can achieve those goals, point at remaining technical challenges, and suggest activities today that will help make the Planet Formation Imager facility a reality.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.11559,
title = {The Planet Formation Imager},
author = {John D. Monnier and Stefan Kraus and Michael J. Ireland and Fabien Baron and Amelia Bayo and Jean-Philippe Berger and Michelle Creech-Eakman and Ruobing Dong and Gaspard Duchene and Catherine Espaillat and Chris Haniff and Sebastian Honig and Andrea Isella and Attila Juhasz and Lucas Labadie and Sylvestre Lacour and Stephanie Leifer and Antoine Merand and Ernest Michael and Stefano Minardi and Christoph Mordasini and David Mozurkewich and Johan Olofsson and Claudia Paladini and Romain Petrov and Jorg-Uwe Pott and Stephen Ridgway and Stephen Rinehart and Keivan Stassun and Jean Surdej and Theo ten Brummelaar and Neal Turner and Peter Tuthill and Kerry Vahala and Gerard van Belle and Gautam Vasisht and Ed Wishnow and John Young and Zhaohuan Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.11559},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
Published in Experimental Astronomy as part of topical collection "Future of Optical-infrared Interferometry in Europe"