The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) Project is dedicated to defining a next-generation facility that can answer fundamental questions about how planets form, including detection of young giant exoplanets and their circumplanetary disks. The proposed expansive design for a 12-element array of 8m class telescopes with >1.2 km baselines would indeed revolutionize our understanding of planet formation and is technically achievable, albeit at a high cost. It has been 10 years since this conceptual design process began and we give an overview of the status of the PFI project. We also review how a scaled back PFI with fewer large telescopes could answer a range of compelling science questions, including in planet formation and as well as totally different astrophysics areas. New opportunities make a space-based PFI more feasible now and we give a brief overview of new efforts that could also pave the way for the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) space mission.
@article{arxiv.2408.03896,
title = {Planet Formation Imager (PFI): Project update and future directions},
author = {John D. Monnier and Stefan Kraus and Michael J. Ireland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.03896},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
submitted to SPIE 2024 (Yokohama). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1807.11555