Absil, Olivier[Université de Liège - ULg > Département d'astrophys., géophysique et océanographie (AGO) > Astroph. extragalactique et observations spatiales (AEOS)]
Augereau, Jean-Charles[Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble; Sterrewacht Leiden, University of Leiden]
The Power of Optical/IR Interferometry: Recent Scientific Results and 2nd Generation Instrumentation
Richichi, A.
Delplancke, F.
Paresce, F.
Chelli, A.
Springer
ESO Astrophysics Symposia
523
No
International
978-3-540-74253
Berlin
Germany
The Power of Optical/IR Interferometry: Recent Scientific Results and 2nd Generation Instrumentation
4-8 April 2005
ESO
Garching
Germany
[en] GENIE, the Ground-based European Nulling Interferometer Experiment, will combine the lights collected in the L’ band by two VLT telescopes in a destructive way, thereby revealing the thermal and/or scattered emission of faint objects in the close neighbourhood of the target star. A prime scientific goal for GENIE thus consists in the detection and characterization of debris disks around nearby Vega-type stars. Thanks to its high angular resolution and operating wavelength (3.8 µm), GENIE will be particularly sensitive to the thermal emission from the warm dust standing within a few AU from the star, a part of the disks which is not accessible with current detection methods (IR photometric excesses, sub-millimeter imaging, …). In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of GENIE to detect and characterize the physical parameters of the debris disk around zeta Leporis, a prototypical Vega-type star suspected to harbour a warm dust component in its debris disk (Fajardo-Acosta et al., AJ 115, 2101). This study is then extended to the detection of faint exozodiacal disks around typical Darwin/TPF targets, thereby demonstrating the very high potential of GENIE in the field of high-contrast imaging.
[Université de Liège - ULg > Département d'astrophys., géophysique et océanographie (AGO) > Astroph. extragalactique et observations spatiales (AEOS)]
