Related papers: Wavefront error correction and Earth-like planet d…
The detection of massive planets orbiting nearby stars has become almost routine, but current techniques are as yet unable to detect terrestrial planets with masses comparable to the Earth's. Future space-based observatories to detect…
Directly imaging Earth-sized exoplanets with a visible-light coronagraph instrument on a space telescope will require a system that can achieve $\sim10^{-10}$ raw contrast and maintain it for the duration of observations (on the order of…
Using 2 aspheric mirrors, it is possible to apodize a telescope beam without losing light or angular resolution: the output beam is produced by ``remapping'' the entrance beam to produce the desired light intensity distribution in a new…
A NASA sounding rocket for high contrast imaging with a visible nulling coronagraph, the Planet Imaging Coronagraphic Technology Using a Reconfigurable Experimental Base (PICTURE-B) payload has made two suborbital attempts to observe the…
The direct imaging of an Earth-like exoplanet will require sub-nanometric wavefront control across large light-collecting apertures, to reject host starlight and detect the faint planetary signal. Current adaptive optics (AO) systems, which…
Resolving spatially-varying exoplanet features from single-point light curves is essential for determining whether Earth-like worlds harbor geological features and/or climate systems that influence habitability. To evaluate the feasibility…
One of the top remaining science challenges in astronomical optics is the direct imaging and characterization of extrasolar planets and planetary systems. Directly imaging exoplanets from ground-based observatories requires combining…
Instrumental aberrations strongly limit high-contrast imaging of exoplanets, especially when they produce quasistatic speckles in the science images. With the help of recent advances in deep learning, we have developed in previous works an…
Direct imaging of exoplanets represents a challenge for astronomical instrumentation due to the high-contrast ratio and small angular separation between the host star and the faint planet. Multi-star systems pose additional challenges for…
Imaging rocky planets in reflected light, a key focus of future NASA missions and ELTs, requires advanced wavefront control to maintain a deep, temporally correlated null of stellar halo at just several diffraction beam widths. We discuss…
Directly observing exoplanets with coronagraphs is impeded by the presence of speckles from aberrations in the optical path, which can be mitigated in hardware with wavefront control as well as in post-processing. This work explores using…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
The Optimal Optical Coronagraph (OOC) Workshop held at the Lorentz Center in September 2017 in Leiden, the Netherlands, gathered a diverse group of 25 researchers working on exoplanet instrumentation to stimulate the emergence and sharing…
In survey series of unknown Earth orbiting objects, no a priori orbital elements are available. In surveys of wide field telescopes possibly many nonresolved object images are present on the single frames of the series. Reliable methods…
Planet detection through microlensing is usually limited by a well-known degeneracy in the Einstein timescale $t_E$, which prevents mass and distance of the lens to be univocally determined. It has been shown that a satellite in…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a next-generation, facility instrument currently being commissioned at the Gemini South observatory. GPI combines an extreme adaptive optics system and integral field spectrograph (IFS) with an…
Exoplanet direct imaging allows us to directly probe and characterize an exoplanet's atmosphere, searching for signs of life in its atmospheric signatures. Directly imaging an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star requires reaching…
Detecting and confirming terrestrial planets is incredibly difficult due to their tiny size and mass relative to Sun-like host stars. However, recent instrumental advancements are making the detection of Earth-like exoplanets…
The combination of high-contrast imaging and medium to high spectral resolution spectroscopy offers new possibilities for the detection and characterization of exoplanets. The molecular mapping technique uses the difference between the…
Direct observation of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is essential to understand how planetary systems were born, how they evolve, and ultimately, to identify biological signatures on these planets. However, the enormous contrast in flux…