Related papers: Confidence Level and Sensitivity Limits in High Co…

We propose to search for biosignatures in the spectra of reflected light from about 100 Earth-sized planets that are already known to be orbiting in their habitable zones (HZ). For a sample of G and K type hosts, most of these planets will…

Transit spectroscopy of habitable planets orbiting late-type stars requires high relative spectro-photometric accuracy between wavelengths during transit/eclipse observation. The spectro-photometric signal is not affected only by image…

The new generation of observatories and instruments (VLT/ERIS, JWST, ELT) motivate the development of robust methods to detect and characterise faint and close-in exoplanets. Molecular mapping and cross-correlation for spectroscopy use…

The useful dynamic range of an image in the diffraction limited regime is usually limited by speckles caused by residual phase errors in the optical system forming the image. The technique of speckle decorrelation involves introducing many…

Thanks to the advances in modern instrumentation we have learned about many exoplanets that span a wide range of masses and composition. Studying their atmospheres provides insight into planetary origin, evolution, dynamics, and…

Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets (``exoEarths'') with a coronagraph instrument on a space telescope requires a stable wavefront with optical path differences limited to tens of picometers RMS during exposure times of a few hours.…

We have surveyed all conventional methods proposed or conceivable for obtaining resolved images of an Earth-like exoplanet. Generating a 10 x 10 pixel map of a 1 R_E world at 10 pc demands ~0.85 uas angular resolution and photon-collection…

Ground-based ultra-high contrast imaging, as required for direct imaging of exoplanets and other solar systems, is limited by difficulty of separating the planetary emission from the effects of optical aberrations that are not compensated…

The major source of noise in high-contrast imaging is the presence of slowly evolving speckles that do not average with time. The temporal stability of the point-spread-function (PSF) is therefore critical to reach a high contrast with…

Rather than using an adaptive optics (AO) system to correct a telescope s entire pupil, it can instead be used to more finely correct a smaller sub-aperture. Indeed, existing AO systems can be used to correct a sub-aperture 1/3 to 1/2 the…

Precision cosmology requires accurate galaxy redshifts, but next generation optical surveys will observe unprecedented numbers of resolved galaxies, placing strain on the amount of spectroscopic follow-up required. We show how useful…

Residual speckles in adaptive optics (AO) images represent a well-known limitation on the achievement of the contrast needed for faint source detection. Speckles in AO imagery can be the result of either residual atmospheric aberrations,…

The High Resolution Camera (HRCam) speckle imager at the 4.1 m Southern Astrophysical Research telescope is a highly productive instrument that has accumulated about 40K observations to date. Its performance (detected flux, level of the…

We develop and apply an analytic method to predict peak counts in weak-lensing surveys. It is based on the theory of Gaussian random fields and suitable to quantify the level of spurious detections caused by chance projections of…

We propose a novel hyperspectral (HS) anomaly detection method that is robust to various types of noise. Most existing HS anomaly detection methods are designed without explicit consideration of noise or are based on the assumption of…

Exoplanet imaging is a major challenge in astrophysics due to the need for high angular resolution and high contrast. We present a multi-scale statistical model for the nuisance component corrupting multivariate image series at high…

Under standard assumptions including stationary and serially uncorrelated Gaussian gravitational wave stochastic background signal and noise distributions, as well as homogenous detector sensitivities, the standard cross-correlation…

Observations of exoplanet atmospheres in high resolution have the potential to resolve individual planetary absorption lines, despite the issues associated with ground-based observations. The removal of contaminating stellar and telluric…

Space-based high contrast imaging mission concepts for studying rocky exoplanets in reflected light are currently under community study. We develop an inverse modeling framework to estimate the science return of such missions given…

Background. Astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with an imaging telescope assumes that the uncertainty on the location of an unresolved source can be an arbitrarily small fraction of the detector pixel, given a sufficient photon…