Anne-Marie Lagrange
Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (Grenoble, France)
Since the discovery of an extended disk of dust around beta Pictoris in the late 80's, this system has been intensively observed and modeled, in connection with planetary system formation/evolution. The presence of planets has been proposed over 2 decades to explain various observations, and high angular resolution imaging allowed us recently to directly image a planet orbiting about 9 AU from the star; this is so far the closest extrasolar planet imaged.
I will present a brief overview of the main indirect signatures of planets around the star, and describe our recent results on beta Pictoris b characterization, as well as its connection to the dust disk. I will also present the current knowledge on the presence of other planets around the star, using several complementary detection technics.
This single system gives already interesting information/constraints about giant planet formation and evolution. I will describe how forthcoming high angular resolution imagers such as Sphere on the VLT will improve our knowledge on giant planet characteristics and help further constraining giant planet formation scenarios.
Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris