Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SCIFY (Self-Calibrated Interferometry for Exoplanet Spectroscopy)
Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31
Current exoplanet research faces many challenges in understanding the nature and formation of planetary systems, including the Solar system. To address these challenges, the development of observing techniques with better sensitivity and angular resolution is required. In that regard, the SCIFY project aims at (i) pushing the sensitivity/performance of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), (ii) building a new high-contrast interferometric instrument for the VLTI, and (iii) performing the scientific exploitation of the instrument. SCIFY is a fundamental research project generating knowledge and contributing to the development of young researchers who are active members of society.
The project started in October 2020 and has already reached several milestones. Regarding the first work package (WP1, enabling extreme contrasts on the VLTI), the state-of-the-art and future directions of the field were published in a review paper and presented in an invited talk at the SPIE (astronomical instrumentation) conference (see Defrère et al. 2020). We have also developed a complete end-to-end VLTI simulator that is now guiding the design choices for the instrument. This simulator has been made open access on GitHub. The development of the laboratory prototype is ongoing (WP2) is ongoing and the first publications are in preparation for 2022. Regarding WP3 (scientific exploitation), we conducted a detailed analysis of an emblematic nearby star, leading to new insights into the structure and origin of the inner planetary system (Defrère et al. 2021).
While most of the progress beyond the state-of-the-art is expected in the third phase of the project (WP3, scientific exploitation of the new instrument), SCIFY has contributed to making progress in better understanding the limits of the VLTI (Defrère et al. 2020) and the nature of planetary systems (Defrère et al. 2021). By the end of the project, SCIFY is expected to significantly increase the sample of young planetary systems characterized near the snow line, where most giant exoplanets are formed and evolved. The dataset will provide key constraints on the formation processes of planetary systems.