A VLTI/AMBER closure-phase search for low-mass companions around nearby young stars: first results on beta Pictoris
English
Absil, Olivier[Université de Liège - ULg > Département d'astrophys., géophysique et océanographie (AGO) > Astroph. extragalactique et observations spatiales (AEOS)]
Le Bouquin, J.-B.[Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble]
Chauvin, G.[Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble]
Hanot, Charles[Université de Liège - ULg > Département d'astrophys., géophysique et océanographie (AGO) > Astroph. extragalactique et observations spatiales (AEOS)]
Augereau, J.-C.[Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble]
Lebreton, J.[Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble]
25-Oct-2010
No
No
International
In the Spirit of Lyot 2010: Direct Detection of Exoplanets and Circumstellar Disks.
25-29 October 2010
University of Paris Diderot
Paris
France
[en] Young stars in nearby moving groups and associations are well suited to search for low-mass companions. In addition to their brightness, their proximity gives access to small linear separations and their youth makes potential low-mass companion brighter than around older main sequence stars. We have recently started a survey of such young nearby stars with the AMBER near-infrared interferometer at the VLTI. The closure phase measurements provided by AMBER on a triplet of baselines are particularly sensitive to nearby off-axis point-like sources. In this talk, we describe the first results of this survey obtained on beta Pictoris. Thanks to a closure phase accuracy of a few 0.1 degree, we show that a 3-sigma sensitivity of about 4e-3 can be reached on the contrast of potential companions for angular separations between 0.01 and 0.2 arcsec. This translates into a companion mass of about 35 Mjup from 0.2 to 4 AU in the case of beta Pictoris. We extrapolate this result on other stars of our survey and discuss the discovery space of AMBER.
[Université de Liège - ULg > Département d'astrophys., géophysique et océanographie (AGO) > Astroph. extragalactique et observations spatiales (AEOS)]
