Related papers: Setting the Stage for the Planet Formation Imager
The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) has the longest baseline in the world, 22.7 m, for performing astronomical interferometry in Fizeau mode, which involves beam combination in a focal plane and preserves a wide…
The physical and chemical conditions in young protoplanetary disks set the boundary conditions for planet formation. Although the dust in disks is relatively easily detected as a far-IR photometric ``excess'' over the expected photospheric…
The increased brightness temperature of young rocky protoplanets during their magma ocean epoch makes them potentially amenable to atmospheric characterization to distances from the solar system far greater than thermally equilibrated…
In the last decade, about a dozen giant exoplanets have been directly imaged in the IR as companions to young stars. With photometry and spectroscopy of these planets in hand from new extreme coronagraphic instruments such as SPHERE at VLT…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has as its science instrument an infrared integral field spectrograph/polarimeter (IFS). Integral field spectrographs are scientificially powerful but require sophisticated data reduction systems. For GPI to…
We describe the design, hardware integration, and calibration performance of the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) instruments for the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission. The WFI instruments are a trio of visible-light…
A major goal of modern astrophysics is to understand the processes by which the universe evolved from its initial simplicity, as seen in measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background, to the universe we see today, with complexity on all…
So far, high resolution techniques on the one hand provide morphological information on bright nearby objects. On the other hand, telescopes with large collecting areas allow us to detect very faint and distant objects, but not to obtain a…
The direct images of giant extrasolar planets recently obtained around several main sequence stars represent a major step in the study of planetary systems. These high-dynamic range images are among the most striking results obtained by the…
The question "How did we get here and what will the future bring?" captures the human imagination and the attention of the National Academy of Science's Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Commitee (AASC). Fulfillment of this "fundamental…
So far, most of the about 5700 exoplanets have been discovered mainly with radial velocity and transit methods. These techniques are sensitive to planets in close orbits, not being able to probe large star--planet separations. $\mu$-lensing…
Near-infrared imaging surveys of high-mass star-forming regions reveal an amazingly complex interplay between star formation and the environment (Churchwell et al. 2006; Alvarez et al. 2004). By means of near-IR spectroscopy the embedded…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…
Planets are a natural byproduct of the stellar formation process, resulting from local aggregations of material within the disks surrounding young stars. Whereas signatures of gas-giant planets at large orbital separations have been…
The Planck High Frequency Instrument (HFI) is designed to measure the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background and galactic foregrounds in six wide bands centered at 100, 143, 217, 353, 545 and 857 GHz at…
Information about the inner structure of young stellar objects is crucial for understanding how the central forming stars gain their mass. However, especially for observations of (usually further away) high-mass young stellar objects,…
The far-infrared (FIR) is one of the few wavelength ranges where no astronomical data with sub-arcsec resolution exist yet. Neither of the medium-term satellite projects like SPICA, Millimetron or OST will resolve this malady. Information…
SPIRou, a near infrared spectropolarimeter, is a project of new instrument to be mounted at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope in 2017. One of the main objectives of SPIRou is to reach a radial velocity accuracy better than 1 m/s in the…
Neutral hydrogen pervades the infant Universe, and its redshifted 21-cm signal allows one to chart the Universe. This signal allows one to probe astrophysical processes such as the formation of the first stars, galaxies, (super)massive…
An interferometric imaging technique has been proposed to instantly measure the diameter of individual spherical dust particles suspended in a gas discharge plasma. The technique is based on the defocused image analysis of both spherical…