Imaging Planet Formation Inside the Diffraction Limit

由加州大学欧文分校首席研究员领导的一个研究小组将调查附近年轻的恒星，寻找行星形成的证据。对成熟的行星系统和年轻的恒星（行星被认为是围绕这些恒星形成的）的数千项观测现在已经存在。尽管有如此丰富的数据，但对于行星是如何形成的却知之甚少。为了更好地理解这一过程，我们需要行星形成的直接图像。虽然与年轻恒星的遥远距离使这些观测变得困难，但现在的望远镜应该可以探测到行星的形成。这个项目将使用一种新的成像方法，在大量年轻恒星周围寻找行星，并有可能探测到正在形成的巨大行星。本科生将通过加州大学桥分校和CAMPARE项目接受指导，这些项目旨在增加未被充分代表的学生完成物理和/或天文学研究生课程的人数。在过去四年毕业的加州桥学者中（所有这些学者都是少数族裔或女性，或两者都有），82%的人继续攻读物理和/或天文学研究生课程。该计划将对大约35个过渡盘进行调查，以探测可能导致原行星盘清理的形成行星。该调查将使用非冗余掩模（NRM）的高分辨率成像技术，该技术通过瞳孔平面掩模将传统望远镜变成干涉测量阵列。NRM的观测结果将比传统方法解决轨道间距小几倍的问题（大多数目标的轨道间距降至~7个天文单位）。这项调查将使用3.8微米的Keck/NIRC2成像仪进行，这使得它比以前在更短波长下进行的原行星搜索具有更高的质量灵敏度。总的来说，这项调查将在95%的置信度下，将这些天体中潜在的快速增长的行星数量限制在15%以内。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.