|
The recent example of PDS 70 has shown that forming giant planets are relatively bright in the near-infrared, with a planet to star contrast of 1:1000. Nevertheless, the detection yields of high-contrast imaging surveys for young planetary-mass companions (e.g., SHINE, GPIES) are small (2%). The reason for this is that wide-separation giant planets are intrinsically rare, and their distribution peaks at semi-major axes of 2-3 au. Classical high-contrast imaging can only probe this parameter space out to 25 pc. Interferometric techniques are the only ones reaching high enough angular resolution to study planet formation in the nearest star-forming regions (120-140 pc). In this talk, I will show how we adapt single-dish kernel phase interferometry for surveying 40 young stars in the Taurus star-forming region from the ground. We achieve detection limits comparable to the protoplanet PDS 70 b at angular separations down to 0.5 lambda/D, proving the high-contrast and high-resolution capabilities of this technique. At even smaller spatial scales, long-baseline optical interferometry with GRAVITY and MATISSE now start to detect exoplanets and circumstellar disks. These detections are still limited by poorly understood systematic errors, though, which is why we develop a method to extract and model these correlated errors directly from the data. By accounting for them in the model fitting process, we find that the faint source detection limits improve by a factor of 2. A proper treatment of the uncertainties is a cornerstone for optical interferometry on its rising path towards studying planet formation and evolution. |
|