[en] The nearby young star β Pictoris is surrounded by the archetypal debris disc, which provides a unique window on the formation and early evolution of terrestrial planets. While the outer disc has been extensively studied since its discovery in 1984, very little is currently known about the inner planetary system (<4AU). Recently, accurate squared visibilities obtained with VLTI/PIONIER revealed the presence of resolved circumstellar emission with an integrated brightness amounting to approximately 1.4% of the stellar brightness in H band. However, it is not clear whether this excess emission originates from thermal emission, reflected light from hot dust grains located in the innermost regions of the planetary system, or is simply due to forward scattering by dust grains located further away (but still within the PIONIER field-of-view, i.e., close to the line of sight). In this paper, we present medium-resolution K-band observations of βPic obtained with VLTI/GRAVITY during science verification. The goals of these observations are to better constrain the temperature of the grains (and hence their location and chemical composition) and to showcase the high-precision capabilities of GRAVITY at detecting faint, close-in circumstellar emission.
Disciplines :
Space science, astronomy & astrophysics
Author, co-author :
Defrere, Denis ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département d'astrophys., géophysique et océanographie (AGO) > Astroph. extragalactique et observations spatiales (AEOS)
Di Matteo, P.
Herpin, F.
Lagadec, E.
Lançon, A.
Meliani, Z.
Royer, F.
Language :
English
Title :
VLTI/GRAVITY observations of the young star βPictoris
Publication date :
01 December 2017
Event name :
SF2A
Event place :
Paris, France
Event date :
from 01-07-2017 to 06-07-2017
Main work title :
SF2A-2017: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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