An Unbiased Near-infrared Interferometric Survey for Hot Exozodiacal Dust

TL;DR

This paper presents a survey using near-infrared interferometry to detect hot exozodiacal dust around main sequence stars, revealing that approximately 10% of observed stars exhibit excess dust emission.

Contribution

It introduces an unbiased observational method employing VLTI/PIONIER to detect hot exozodiacal dust, providing new statistical insights into its prevalence.

Findings

9 out of 85 stars show exozodiacal dust excess

Survey demonstrates interferometry's effectiveness in detecting hot dust

Provides statistical data on exozodiacal dust occurrence around nearby stars

Abstract

Exozodiacal dust is warm or hot dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems orbiting main sequence stars, in or around their habitable zones. The dust can be the most luminous component of extrasolar planetary systems, but predominantly emits in the near- to mid-infrared where it is outshone by the host star. Interferometry provides a unique method of separating this dusty emission from the stellar emission. The visitor instrument PIONIER at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has been used to search for hot exozodiacal dust around a large sample of nearby main sequence stars. The results of this survey are summarised: 9 out of 85 stars show excess exozodiacal emission over the stellar photospheric emission.