High-contrast imaging of Sirius~A with VLT/SPHERE: Looking for giant planets down to one astronomical unit
A. Vigan, C. Gry, G. Salter, D. Mesa, D. Homeier, C. Moutou, F. Allard

TL;DR
This study used VLT/SPHERE to perform high-contrast imaging of Sirius A, probing for giant planets within 1 AU, achieving unprecedented sensitivity and setting new detection limits without discovering additional companions.
Contribution
First to explore Sirius A's innermost regions with VLT/SPHERE, providing new detection limits for giant planets down to 0.5 AU and developing a robust method for spectral data analysis.
Findings
Achieved contrast of 14.3 mag at 0.2" and 19 mag at 3.7".
Sensitive to planets down to 4 Jupiter masses at 10 AU.
Rejected the presence of an 8 Jupiter mass planet at 1 AU with 50% probability.
Abstract
Sirius has always attracted a lot of scientific interest, especially after the discovery of a companion white dwarf at the end of the 19th century. Very early on, the existence of a potential third body was put forward to explain some of the observed properties of the system. We present new coronagraphic observations obtained with VLT/SPHERE that explore, for the very first time, the innermost regions of the system down to 0.2" (0.5 AU) from Sirius A. Our observations cover the near-infrared from 0.95 to 2.3 m and they offer the best on-sky contrast ever reached at these angular separations. After detailing the steps of our SPHERE/IRDIFS data analysis, we present a robust method to derive detection limits for multi-spectral data from high-contrast imagers and spectrographs. In terms of raw performance, we report contrasts of 14.3 mag at 0.2", ~16.3 mag in the 0.4-1.0" range and…
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