Pushing down with the contrast: scientific performances with SPHERE-IFS
Abstract
The VLT second generation instrument SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanets Research) was commissioned in the Summer of 2014, and offered to the community in the Spring of 2015. SPHERE is a high contrast imager that exploits its three scientific channels in order to observe and discover young warm exoplanets in the glare of their host stars. The three scientific instrument are: ZIMPOL, a polarization analyzer and imager that works in the visible range of wavelength, IRDIS a dual band imager and spectro polarimetric Camera that works in the NIR range up to K band, and IFS, an integral field spectrograph working in the YJH band. Very important is the complementarity between IRDIS and IFS. The former has a larger Field of view (about 12 arcseconds) while the IFS push its examination very close to the central star (FoV 1.7 arcsec). In one year of operational time a lot of very interesting scientific cases were investigated and very nice results were gathered. In this paper we would like to focus the attention on the high quality results and performances obtained with the IFS.
- Publication:
-
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VI
- Pub Date:
- August 2016
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2232827
- Bibcode:
- 2016SPIE.9908E..3HC