Related papers: The SPHERE view of multiple star formation
The SHINE project is a 500-star survey performed with SPHERE on the VLT for the purpose of directly detecting new substellar companions and understanding their formation and early evolution. Here we present an initial statistical analysis…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
Multiple systems play an important role in the evolution of star clusters. First we discuss several formation mechanisms which depend on the presence of binaries, either primordial or of dynamical origin. Hierarchical configurations are…
The far-IR range is a critical wavelength range to characterize the physical and chemical processes that transform the interstellar material into stars and planets. Objects in the earliest phases of stellar and planet evolution release most…
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…
I review theoretical models of star formation and how they apply across the stellar mass spectrum. Several distinct theories are under active study for massive star formation, especially Turbulent Core Accretion, Competitive Accretion and…
Although the photon structure is most efficiently studied with the accelerator instruments, there is also a scientifically complementary potential in investigations on photons produced in the outer space. This potential is already being…
This chapter discusses the use and possibilities of optical and infrared interferometry to study star formation. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the star formation process and highlights the open questions from an observational…
Large surveys with new-generation high-contrast imaging instruments are needed to derive the frequency and properties of exoplanet populations with separations from $\sim$5 to 300 AU. A careful assessment of the stellar properties is…
The envelopes and disks that surround protostars reflect the initial conditions of star and planet formation and govern the assembly of stellar masses. Characterizing these structures requires observations that span the near-infrared to…
We present the performance of the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) of SPHERE, the high-contrast imager for the ESO VLT telescope designed to perform imaging and spectroscopy of extrasolar planets, obtained from tests performed at the…
Astronomical polarimetry is a powerful technique that can provide physical information sometimes difficult or impossible to obtain by any other type of observation. Almost every class of binary star can benefit from polarimetric…
The primary goal of this thesis was the correction of Non-Common-Path-Aberrations in the SPHERE instrument for helping it meeting its contrast requirements. SPHERE's purpose is the search and characterization of giant exo-planets around…
The Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory - \emph{STEREO}, is a system of two identical spacecraft in Heliocentric Earth orbit. We use the two Heliospheric Imagers (HI), which are wide angle imagers with multi-baffle systems to do high…
SAXO+ is a planned enhancement of the existing SAXO, the VLT/ SPHERE adaptive optics system, deployed on ESO's Very Large Telescope. This upgrade is designed to significantly enhance the instrument's capacity to detect and analyze young…
Spectroastrometry is a technique which has the potential to resolve flux distributions on scales of milliarcseconds. In this study, we examine the application of spectroastrometry to binary point sources which are spatially unresolved due…
Binarity in massive stars has proven to be an important aspect in the their evolution. For Be stars, it might be the cause of their spin up, and thus part of the mechanism behind the formation of their viscous decretion disks. Detecting…
Protoplanetary disks, debris disks, and disrupted or evaporating planets can all feed accretion onto stars. The photospheric abundances of such stars may then reveal the composition of the accreted material. This is especially likely in B…
Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…
Observations performed with high-resolution imaging techniques revealed the existence of shadows in circumstellar disks that can be explained by the misalignment of an inner with respect to an outer disk. The cause of misalignment, however,…