Romain Laugier, PhD student contributing to the KERNEL project, saw his first paper accepted by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The paper shows how images affected by some amount of saturation can be salvaged to make them kernel-compatible again.

Using an archival HST/NICMOS dataset from 1997, Romain was able to show on a known low-mass binary that the recovery algorithm is effective. The signature of the 4.36 magnitude contrast companion, invisible in the original image, is present in the kernel-phase extracted from that image. This kernel-signature was used to constrain the position and contrast of the companion.

This new resolved observation of the low mass companion to Gl 494 along with other recently published images, combined with a long series of archival radial velocity observations by two instruments, lead to very strong constraints on the orbital elements, and ultimately, the dynamical masses of this binary object.

Congratulations to Romain for successfully bringing this paper to the finish line: may this be the first of many others to come! The preprint version of the paper is available for download on the arXiv.org website: http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02824