The GRAVITY+ Project: Towards All-sky, Faint-Science, High-Contrast Near-Infrared Interferometry at the VLTI

Abstract

The GRAVITY instrument has been revolutionary for near-infrared interferometry by pushing sensitivity and precision to previously unknown limits. With the upgrade of GRAVITY and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in GRAVITY+, these limits will be pushed even further, with vastly improved sky coverage, as well as faint-science and high-contrast capabilities. This upgrade includes the implementation of wide-field off-axis fringe-tracking, new adaptive optics systems on all Unit Telescopes, and laser guide stars in an upgraded facility. GRAVITY+ will open up the sky to the measurement of black hole masses across cosmic time in hundreds of active galactic nuclei, use the faint stars in the Galactic centre to probe General Relativity, and enable the characterisation of dozens of young exoplanets to study their formation, bearing the promise of another scientific revolution to come at the VLTI.

Published in the ESO Messenger

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Shadows of naked singularity in Brans-Dicke gravity
• Premature supermassive black hole mergers in cosmological simulations of structure formation
• First Resolution of Microlensed Images of a Binary-Lens Event
• Searching for Protoplanets around MWC 758 and MWC 480 in Br-$\gamma$ using Kernel Phase and SCExAO/CHARIS
• "Industrial-Scale" Black Hole Selection without a Satellite
• Astronomy from the Moon: From Exoplanets to Cosmology in Visible Light and Beyond
• A Convolutional Neural Network for the Recovery of Transfer Functions From Velocity-Resolved Reverberation Mapping Data