Periodic Reporting for period 4 - NewWorlds (Magnetic Fields and the Formation of New Worlds)
Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2023-09-30
NewWorlds addresses these forefront topics by exploiting SPIRou, a new state-of-the-art near-infrared spectropolarimeter / velocimeter integrated in our group in 2017 and installed in 2018 on the 3.6-m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawaii. Since 2019, SPIRou has been carrying out two Large Observation Programmes, first the SPIRou Legacy Survey (SLS) then SPICE, directly related to NewWorlds' objectives and allocated 484 CFHT nights over the duration of the project.
With SPIRou, the SLS and SPICE, the dedicated NewWorlds team and collaborators unveiled unknown planets orbiting our closest stellar neighbors. NewWorlds also explored how stars and their planetary systems like our own Solar System form and evolve into maturity, and how magnetic fields contribute to their birth.
As recently illustrated by the Nobel Prized in Physics awarded to the discoverers of the first exoplanet, NewWorlds’ results, addressing the existence of other potentially habitable worlds around nearby stars as well as the mysteries of the origins of life in the Solar System, are of obvious interest for the general public.
Over the duration of NewWorlds, the NewWorlds team (4 staff members, 2 postdocs and 5 PhD studends) worked on 100+ publications, most of them in refereed journals, characterizing the stars that were observed with SPIRou, documenting their magnetic topologies (see image #1) and outlining the discovery of unknown planets.
A SPIRou model at a scale of 1:10 was built by professional model maker "Space Model" (see image #3) to render outreach events more visual and attractive. A 40min documentary was also produced to outline to a large public the main science goals underlying the NewWorlds project, and more generally the quest for habitable exoplanets.