Connecting SPHERE and CRIRES+ for the characterisation of young exoplanets at high spectral resolution: status update of VLT/HiRISE

TL;DR

The paper discusses the development of HiRISE, a project that combines SPHERE and CRIRES+ instruments at the VLT to enable high-resolution spectroscopic characterization of young exoplanets, addressing current limitations.

Contribution

It introduces the HiRISE project, which integrates two major VLT instruments for high-resolution exoplanet study, and provides an overview of its implementation and expected performance.

Findings

Successful integration of SPHERE and CRIRES+ via fiber coupling planned for early 2023

Expected enhancement in exoplanet characterization capabilities at high spectral resolution

Preliminary performance assessments indicate promising results for the combined system.

Abstract

New generation exoplanet imagers on large ground-based telescopes are highly optimised for the detection of young giant exoplanets in the near-infrared, but they are intrinsically limited for their characterisation by the low spectral resolution of their integral field spectrographs ($R<100$). High-dispersion spectroscopy at $R \gg 10^4$ would be a powerful tool for the characterisation of these planets, but there is currently no high-resolution spectrograph with extreme adaptive optics and coronagraphy that would enable such characterisation. With project HiRISE we propose to use fiber coupling to combine the capabilities of two flagship instruments at the Very Large Telescope in Chile: the exoplanet imager SPHERE and the high-resolution spectrograph CRIRES+. The coupling will be implemented at the telescope in early 2023. We provide a general overview of the implementation of HiRISE, of its assembly, integration and testing (AIT) phase in Europe, and a brief assessment of its expected performance based on the final hardware.