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In our recent article we report on the observation of hot dust around the star Kappa Tucanae.
The hot dust is located at <20 solar radii of its parent star, which heats the dust up
to ~1000 °C but also makes its observations extremely challenging.
We used the new instrument MATISSE at ESO's Very Large Telescope operating on the Paranal
mountain in the Atacama desert of Chile. Combining the light of four single telescopes
with sophisticated measuring methods like interferometry, we could mimic a telescope of
up to 100 metres in diameter. This allowed us to detect the faint radiation of the hot
dust in the mid-infrared for the first time. Our study is the very first peer-reviewed
publication of observational data obtained by MATISSE. The collected observational data
allow us to infer the properties of the dust around Kappa Tucanae. Future observations
will help to further improve our understanding of the exoplanetary phenomenon of hot
dust rings around other stars.
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