Periodic Reporting for period 3 - COBREX (COupling data and techniques for BReakthroughs in EXoplanetary systems exploration)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-10-01 bis 2025-03-31
Exoplanetology has become a major topic in astronomy over the last 30 years. Exoplanets with masses between 1 Earth-mass and 10+ Jupiter-masses have been found, revealing an unexpected diversity that challenges theories of planetary systems formation and early evolution.
Yet, the regions around the stars where planets can orbit are still very partially explored. In particular, the 5-20 au region, where giant planets formed by accretion of gas on to a solid core are supposed to be predominantly found, remains barely explored due to instrumental limitations.
COBREX mainly focusses on giants planets. Because of their masses, giant planets strongly impact the dynamics and fate of lighter bodies (e.g. telluric planets, planetesimals) during and after the proto-planetary phases. They might also impact planet habitability. From an observational point of view, giant planets may also impact the detectability of lighter and closer-in planets with Radial Velocity and astrometry. It is therefore crucial to have the most complete statistical knowledge of giant planet populations, as well as detailed information on individual systems.
The main objective of COBREX is to explore the 5-20 au region, using innovative signal processing developments applied to archival High Contrast Imaging data and/or high-performance, AO-fed medium/high resolution spectrographs. This will, in particular, allow witnessing, for the first time, analogues of our Solar System giants at early ages, and constraining the distribution of giant planets in the 5-20 au. Combining various data (High Contrast Imaging, GAIA, Radial velocity) will furthermore allow characterizing the mass and the orbital properties of the planets, and performing individual analysis as well as measuring the demography of young giant planets from hundredths to hundreds of au.
A second objective is to couple HCI with medium/high resolution spectroscopy, to find and study planet physical and atmospheric properties into exquisite details. This will require developing and using the most up to date spectral libraries.
A third objective is to search for and study debris disks, aged a few Myr in the same archival data. As such, these debris disks represent the remnants of giant planet formation and the sites of possible on-going terrestrial planet formation.
Coupling our results on planets and disks searches, we hope to investigate the link between disks and planets.
Finally, COBREX will explore the possibility of imaging remote magmatic super-Earths in the near future thanks to such improvements.
Yet, the regions around the stars where planets can orbit are still very partially explored. In particular, the 5-20 au region, where giant planets formed by accretion of gas on to a solid core are supposed to be predominantly found, remains barely explored due to instrumental limitations.
COBREX mainly focusses on giants planets. Because of their masses, giant planets strongly impact the dynamics and fate of lighter bodies (e.g. telluric planets, planetesimals) during and after the proto-planetary phases. They might also impact planet habitability. From an observational point of view, giant planets may also impact the detectability of lighter and closer-in planets with Radial Velocity and astrometry. It is therefore crucial to have the most complete statistical knowledge of giant planet populations, as well as detailed information on individual systems.
The main objective of COBREX is to explore the 5-20 au region, using innovative signal processing developments applied to archival High Contrast Imaging data and/or high-performance, AO-fed medium/high resolution spectrographs. This will, in particular, allow witnessing, for the first time, analogues of our Solar System giants at early ages, and constraining the distribution of giant planets in the 5-20 au. Combining various data (High Contrast Imaging, GAIA, Radial velocity) will furthermore allow characterizing the mass and the orbital properties of the planets, and performing individual analysis as well as measuring the demography of young giant planets from hundredths to hundreds of au.
A second objective is to couple HCI with medium/high resolution spectroscopy, to find and study planet physical and atmospheric properties into exquisite details. This will require developing and using the most up to date spectral libraries.
A third objective is to search for and study debris disks, aged a few Myr in the same archival data. As such, these debris disks represent the remnants of giant planet formation and the sites of possible on-going terrestrial planet formation.
Coupling our results on planets and disks searches, we hope to investigate the link between disks and planets.
Finally, COBREX will explore the possibility of imaging remote magmatic super-Earths in the near future thanks to such improvements.
Our work has been mainly focused in setting up the infrastructure, developing and testing the tools (at least the first generation of tools, as we still aim to further improve them) necessary for our project.
We built the COBREX Data Center dedicated to the automated process of all high contrast imaging archival data related to exoplanets and disks.
We applied our PACO analyzing tools to a small sample of SPHERE targets to test our methodological approach for exoplanet searches, before launching a massive reduction. The results were very conclusive : they confirmed a significant improvement in detection capabilities compared to classical analyzing tools. This validates then our approach and gives promises of new detections.
We also developed tools to search for very faint debris disks in the same data. A small survey on a restricted number of targets was also designed to test reference frames selection before applying the technique to all available SPHERE data. We studied in detail two structured debris disks imaged by SPHERE in the Sco-Cen association.
We refined tools to infer the atmospheric parameters of giant exoplanets deeply buried into the stellar halo and searched for planets in young transition disks.
We developed unprecedented tools to identify the presence of planets around stars observed with the Gaia satellite, and to constrain their mass and orbital properties. We started to apply our tool on Gaia (DR3 data), high contrast imaging and/or radial velocity data and already discovered and/or further constrained several giant exoplanets.
We made a thorough analysis of the limitations of the VLT/ERIS/SPIFFIER instrument for exoplanet detection and characterization. It turned out that most of the targets suitable to exoplanet searches will not be observable due to detector saturation. We
proposed to insert a mask in the instrument to block the star light. We also performed a conceptual design of the device.
Only a handful of directly imaged exoplanets have high-quality medium or high resolution spectra. We started to increase that number using the VLT/SINFONI and X-SHOOTER near-IR spectrographs. We inverted these spectra to determine the abundances of key molecules, possible imprints of their formation conditions.
We built the COBREX Data Center dedicated to the automated process of all high contrast imaging archival data related to exoplanets and disks.
We applied our PACO analyzing tools to a small sample of SPHERE targets to test our methodological approach for exoplanet searches, before launching a massive reduction. The results were very conclusive : they confirmed a significant improvement in detection capabilities compared to classical analyzing tools. This validates then our approach and gives promises of new detections.
We also developed tools to search for very faint debris disks in the same data. A small survey on a restricted number of targets was also designed to test reference frames selection before applying the technique to all available SPHERE data. We studied in detail two structured debris disks imaged by SPHERE in the Sco-Cen association.
We refined tools to infer the atmospheric parameters of giant exoplanets deeply buried into the stellar halo and searched for planets in young transition disks.
We developed unprecedented tools to identify the presence of planets around stars observed with the Gaia satellite, and to constrain their mass and orbital properties. We started to apply our tool on Gaia (DR3 data), high contrast imaging and/or radial velocity data and already discovered and/or further constrained several giant exoplanets.
We made a thorough analysis of the limitations of the VLT/ERIS/SPIFFIER instrument for exoplanet detection and characterization. It turned out that most of the targets suitable to exoplanet searches will not be observable due to detector saturation. We
proposed to insert a mask in the instrument to block the star light. We also performed a conceptual design of the device.
Only a handful of directly imaged exoplanets have high-quality medium or high resolution spectra. We started to increase that number using the VLT/SINFONI and X-SHOOTER near-IR spectrographs. We inverted these spectra to determine the abundances of key molecules, possible imprints of their formation conditions.
These preliminary results validate our approaches, and make us confident that our objectives will be fulfilled.