SPHERE+: Imaging young Jupiters down to the snowline

Understand

SPHERE (Beuzit et al,.

• 2019) has now been in operation at the VLT for more than 5 years, demonstrating a high level of performance.
• SPHERE has produced outstanding results using a variety of operating modes, primarily in the field of direct imaging of exoplanetary systems, focusing on exoplanets as point sources and circumstellar disks as extended objects.
• The achievements obtained thus far with SPHERE (~200 refereed publications) in different areas (exoplanets, disks, solar system, stellar physics...) have motivated a large consortium to propose an even more ambitious set of science cases, and its corresponding technical implementation in the form of an upgrade.