Imaging Planet Formation Inside the Diffraction Limit

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

A research team led by a Principal Investigator from the University of California-Irvine will survey young, nearby stars looking for evidence of planet formation. Thousands of observations of mature planetary systems and of young stars around which planets are thought to form now exist. Despite this wealth of data, remarkably little is known about how planets form. Direct images of forming planets are needed to better understand this process. While the large distances to young stars make these observations difficult, forming planets should be detectable by today's telescopes. This program will use a new imaging method to search for planets around a large sample of young stars and has the potential to detect giant forming planets. Undergraduate students will be mentored through the Cal-Bridge and CAMPARE programs, which aim to increase the number of underrepresented students who complete graduate studies in physics and/or astronomy. Of the graduating Cal-Bridge scholars in the last four years (all of which have been underrepresented minorities or women, or both), 82% have gone on to a graduate program in physics and/or astronomy. This program will conduct a survey of about 35 transition disks to detect forming planets that might be causing the protoplanetary disk clearings. The survey will use the high-resolution imaging technique of non-redundant masking (NRM), which turns a conventional telescope into an interferometric array via a pupil-plane mask. The NRM observations will resolve orbital separations several times smaller than traditional methods (down to ~7 Astronomical Units for most targets). The survey will be carried out using the Keck/NIRC2 imager at 3.8 microns, making it more mass-sensitive than previous protoplanet searches, which were executed at shorter wavelengths. In its entirety, the survey will constrain the underlying rapidly-accreting planet population in these objects to within ~15% at 95% confidence. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.