Unveiling new stellar companions from the PIONIER exozodi survey
Lindsay Marion, Olivier Absil, Steve Ertel, Jean-Baptiste Le Bouquin,, Denis Defrere

TL;DR
This paper uses closure phase measurements from the PIONIER survey to identify faint stellar companions, distinguishing them from disks, and reports four new companions, enhancing understanding of exozodiacal environments.
Contribution
It introduces a method using closure phases to detect faint companions in exozodi survey data, revealing four new stellar companions and improving discrimination between disks and companions.
Findings
Four new stellar companions discovered with contrasts from 2% to 95%.
Tentative detection of additional faint companions requiring follow-up.
Method effectively differentiates between disks and point-like companions.
Abstract
The main goal of the EXOZODI survey is to detect and characterize circumstellar dust and to propose the first statistical study of exozodiacal disks in the near-infrared using telescopes in both hemispheres. For this purpose, Ertel et al. have conducted in 2012 a survey of nearby main sequence stars with VLTI/PIONIER to search for the presence of circumstellar dust. This survey, carried out during 12 nights, comprises about 100 stars. For each star, we obtained typically three OBs and we searched for circumstellar emission based on the measurement of squared visibilities at short baselines. A drop in the measured visibilities with respect to the expected photospheric visibility indicates the presence of resolved emission around the target star. It is however generally not possible to conclude on the morphology of the detected emission based solely on the squared visibilities. Here, we…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
