English

Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2016-09-07 v1

Abstract

High-contrast adaptive optics imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past decade and especially the last few years with the advent of high-order adaptive optics systems, dedicated planet-finding instruments with specialized coronagraphs, and innovative observing and post-processing strategies to suppress speckle noise. This review summarizes recent progress in high-contrast imaging with particular emphasis on observational results, discoveries near and below the deuterium-burning limit, and a practical overview of large-scale surveys and dedicated instruments. I conclude with a statistical meta-analysis of deep imaging surveys in the literature. Based on observations of 384 unique and single young (\approx5--300~Myr) stars spanning stellar masses between 0.1--3.0~\Msun, the overall occurrence rate of 5--13~\Mjup \ companions at orbital distances of 30--300~AU is 0.60.5+0.7^{+0.7}_{-0.5}\% assuming hot-start evolutionary models. The most massive giant planets regularly accessible to direct imaging are about as rare as hot Jupiters are around Sun-like stars. Dividing this sample into individual stellar mass bins does not reveal any statistically-significant trend in planet frequency with host mass: giant planets are found around 2.82.3+3.7^{+3.7}_{-2.3}\% of BA stars, <<4.1\% of FGK stars, and <<3.9\% of M dwarfs. Looking forward, extreme adaptive optics systems and the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes with smaller inner working angles and deeper detection limits will increase the pace of discovery to ultimately map the demographics, composition, evolution, and origin of planets spanning a broad range of masses and ages.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.02731,
  title  = {Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets},
  author = {Brendan P. Bowler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.02731},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

PASP invited review, accepted

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:56:45.127Z