🔎 MagNIFIES Science

From the youngest stars still enshrouded in clouds of gas and dust to the bulge of stars that record the history of our Galaxy, Carnegie’s Magellan Telescopes have an unparalleled view of the Milky Way. MagNIFIES, will provide a unique platform with which to study exoplanet formation and evolution.

MagNIFIES will be a general purpose instrument available for curiosity-driven research. We have developed our science requirements based on a few key science programs, some of which are explained here.

Exoplanet Atmospheres

Characterization of exoplanet atmospheres is a major scientific undertaking on both ground and space telescopes focused on three main scientific questions: 1) How do we use atmospheric composition to infer the formation history of planets? 2) Do rocky planets around old M-stars retain their atmospheres such that they could harbor life? Relevant to both of these is 3) What are the important physical and chemical processes in atmospheres over time? MagNIFIES has an important role to play in answering all of these questions.

Exoplanet Atmospheric Chemistry

High spectral resolution observations provide opportunities for deeper understanding of atmospheric composition. MagNIFIES will cover the same spectral range as JWST’s NIRSPEC but at 15-20x the spectral resolution. High resolution spectroscopy is required to measure atmospheric compositions in hazy/cloudy atmospheres, which appear to be common amongst sub-neptunes. The figures compares line strengths observable in clear (blue) and hazy (pink) atmospheres at different spectral resolutions and demonstrates that while haze/clouds mute the spectral features, high resolution spectroscopy reveals molecules above the clouds (figures from Hood et al. 2020).

MagNIFIES large spectral coverage will be ideal for studying exoplanet atmosphere dynamics. In hot planets, line broadening can reveal the presence of horizontal winds that redistribute heat The figure shows the discovery, with VLT/CRIRES, of double peaked molecular lines, shifted by +/- 8 km/s without emission at the rest velocity, from the planet WASP 127 reveal a super-rotating equatorial jet as hotter dayside material enters the nightside and then cools. (figure from (Nortmann et al. 2025

Exoplanet Atmospheric Dynamics

Exoplanet Evolution

MagNIFIES can study the mass loss rate of atmospheres to find out if exoplanets are born with different atmospheres or evolve that way due to the effects of their stars. The Figure shows an observation of excess absorption by HeI in the transit spectrum of TOI-1259 Ab, a Saturn-mass planet near the boundary of the “Neptune desert.” The low mass loss rate inferred implies that this planet has lost only a small amount of mass due to photoevaporation. The line is blueshifted by 5.5 km/s, indicating day to nightside flow, and may change velocity over the transit in ways that need further investigation (figure from Saidel et al. 2025).

Young Stars and Planet Formation

The last two decades have seen the discovery of a vast variety of planetary systems, most of which are unlike the Solar System. A central question is how this variety arose. The raw materials for planet formation are the leftovers from star formation, and planets form symbiotically with their host stars. Therefore, the formation of planets is intimately tied to the processes that transform material from dense molecular clouds to protostars with infalling envelopes to optically-revealed young stars with disks. MagNIFIES can provide key contributions in kinematically and time-resolved studies of disks that will address important questions relevant to planet formation: 1) Does the activity of young stars change the conditions for planet formation? 2) Do different kinds of planets form in different kinds of disks around different mass stars?

MagNIFIES will cover a large range of wavelengths important to understanding how young stars influence planet formation. The figure shows the spectrum of the nearest star with a protoplanetary disk, TW Hya (Vacca & Sandell (2011) with IRTF), overlayed with a subset of the interesting spectral features available for young stars, brown dwarfs, and circumstellar disks across the near-infrared region that MagNIFIES observes simultaneously. Hydrogen emission line profiles and strengths probe disk accretion physics, spectral shape and atomic line widths indicate age, Zeeman splitting measures stellar magnetic fields, molecular emission lines reveal disk kinematics, abundances, and temperature structure.The He 1.083 μm emission line traces inflow and winds.

Planet Formation around Young Stars

Planet Formation Chemistry

MagNIFIES will probe the region of terrestrial planet formation to see if rocky planets can have compositions similar to Earth's. In this figure, it took 16 settings of VLT/CRIRES to cover just half of the wavelengths that MagNIFIES will observe all at once. The velocity of the lines of CO, OH, and water detected here demonstrate the gas comes from 0.03 - 0.1 au (figure from Grant et al. 2014).

Galactic Assembly

The enormous wealth of information in infrared stellar spectra taken at high resolution means MagNIFIES can make great strides in studying the composition of stars throughout the Milky Way and its globular clusters, even through obscured areas of the bulge and disk. The key question is what can be learned about the details of galaxy assembly from the Milky Way that can inform our general understanding of how all galaxies build over cosmic time.

Chemical - Dynamical Galactic Archaeology

The SDSS APOGEE surveys have demonstrated that near-infrared spectra are key to mapping the history of the Milky Way. The figure's colored ellipses show chemically distinct groups, as determined with APOGEE spectra of ~1700 stars in the halo that all have high eccentricity. This “chemodynamical” analysis can identify stars thar formed in galaxies that merged into the Milky Way from star clusters that evolved in situ (figure from Myeong et al. 2022).

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