NPF update: light-weight mirror development in Chile

Abstract

Planet Formation research is blooming in an era where we are moving from speaking about "protoplanetary disks" to "planet forming disks" (Andrews et al., 2018). However, this transition is still motivated by indirect (but convincing) hints. Up to date, the direct detection of planets "in the making" remains elusive with the remarkable exception of PDS 70 b and c (Haffert et al., 2019;Keppler et al., 2018;Müller et al., 2018). The scarcity of detections is attributable to technical challenges, and even for the rare jewels that we can detect, characterization (resolving their hill spheres) is unachievable. The next step in this direction demands from near to mid-infrared interferometry to jump from ∼100 m baselines to ∼1 km, and from very few telescopes (two to six) to 20 or more (PFI like concepts, Monnier et al. ( 2018)). This transition needs for more affordable near to mid-infrared telescopes to be designed. Since the driving cost for such telescopes resides on the primary mirror, in particular scaling with its diameter and weight, our approach to tackle this problem relies on the production of low-cost light mirrors.