SPHERE tagged posts

The twist marks the spot. Observations made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed the telltale signs of a star system being born...

This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star.
Credit: ESO/A. Müller et al.

SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has captured the first confirmed image of a planet caught in the act of forming in the dusty disc surrounding a young star. The young planet is carving a path through the primordial disc of gas and dust around the very young star PDS 70. The data suggest that the planet’s atmosphere is cloudy.

The SPHERE instrument enabled...

Picture taken by SPHERE, showing the planet made visible after the star has been hidden by the coronograph (A).
Credit: © UNIGE

An international team, including members of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, discovered an exoplanet by direct imaging using SPHERE, an instrument designed and developed by a consortium of 12 European institutes on the Very Large Telescope VLT ESO, based in Chile. The instrument, which corrects in real time the terrestrial atmospheric turbulences and occults the light of the star, allows to take a real “photography” of the exoplanet. While more than 3600 exoplanets were discovered through indirect methods, only a handful of them could be observed by direct imaging.

In order to take this kind of image, SPHERE is equipped with a deformable mirror that ...

These three planetary discs have been observed with the SPHERE instrument, mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The observations were made in order to shed light on the enigmatic evolution of fledgling planetary systems. The central parts of the images appear dark because SPHERE blocks out the light from the brilliant central stars to reveal the much fainter structures surrounding them. Credit: ESO

3 teams of astronomers have made use of SPHERE, an advanced exoplanet-hunting instrument on the VLT at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in order to shed light on the enigmatic evolution of fledgling planetary systems. The explosion in the number of known exoplanets in recent years has made the study of them one of the most dynamic fields in modern astronomy...