CHEOPS: A SECOND GENERATION VLT INSTRUMENT FOR THE DIRECT DETECTION OF EXO-PLANETS

摘要

The second generation VLT instrument CHEOPS will be a high-contrast, adaptive optics based system for the direct detection of both cold (mature), and warm (young) exo-planets. The instrument will exploit two diffent arms at once, both fed by light split by a dichroic mirror. The spectroscopic arm is a very low resolution NIR integral field spectrograph (IFS) operating in the JH bands. The second arm is a polarimetric I band imager using the ZIMPOL technique (Schmid et al. 2002). CHEOPS will be optimized to detect photons emitted from the surface of extrasolar planets by reflection and/or thermal emission. Additional science topics which will be addressed by CHEPS include the study of brown dwarfs, of circumstel-lar disks and related phenomena such as mass loss mechanisms, of stellar winds, of planetary nebulae and presumably even of supernova explosions.