Related papers: The LAOG-Planet Imaging Surveys
One of the most exciting scientific challenges is to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy and search for evidence of life. The ability to observe and characterise dozens of potentially Earth-like…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
We have now accumulated a wealth of observations of the planet-formation environment and of mature planetary systems. These data allow us to test and refine theories of gas-giant planet formation by placing constraints on the conditions and…
The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…
Within the next few years, GAIA and several instruments aiming at imag- ing extrasolar planets will see first light. In parallel, low mass planets are being searched around red dwarfs which offer more favourable conditions, both for radial…
Young brown dwarfs and directly-imaged exoplanets have enticingly similar photometric and spectroscopic characteristics, indicating that their cool, low gravity atmospheres should be studied in concert. Similarities between the peculiar…
One of the great quests of astronomy is to obtain the spectrum of a terrestrial planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star, and the dominant challenge in doing so is to isolate the light of the planet from that of the star.…
Direct imaging has led to the discovery of several giant planet and brown dwarf companions. These imaged companions populate a mass, separation and age domain (mass>1MJup, orbits>5AU, age<1Gyr) quite distinct from the one occupied by…
High-contrast observations in optical and infrared astronomy are defined as any observation requiring a technique to reveal a celestial object of interest that is in such close angular proximity to another source brighter by a factor of at…
The Lyot project used an optimized Lyot coronagraph with Extreme Adaptive Optics at the 3.63m Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope (AEOS) to observe 86 stars from 2004 to 2007. In this paper we give an overview of the survey results…
Astrophysical research into exoplanets has delivered thousands of confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. These planets span a wide ranges of size and composition, with diversity also being the hallmark of system configurations, the great…
Exoplanets which are detected using the radial velocity technique have a well-known ambiguity of their true mass, caused by the unknown inclination of the planetary orbit with respect to the plane of the sky. Constraints on the inclination…
Extrasolar planet searches targeting very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are hampered by intrinsic or instrumental limitations. Time series of astrometric measurements with precisions better than one milli-arcsecond can yield new evidence…
The physical properties of faint stellar and substellar objects often rely on indirect, model-dependent estimates. For example, the masses of brown dwarfs are usually inferred using evolutionary models, which are age dependent and have yet…
We describe the motivation, design, and early results for our 42-night, 125 star Subaru/SCExAO direct imaging survey for planets around accelerating stars. Unlike prior large surveys, ours focuses only on stars showing evidence for an…
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
Colour-magnitude diagrams form a traditional way of presenting luminous objects in the Universe and compare them to each others. Here, we estimate the photometric distance of 44 transiting exoplanetary systems. Parallaxes for seven systems…
The initial results of the Deep Lens Survey (http://dls.bell-labs.com) to identify possible brown dwarfs and extremely metal poor red halo subdwarfs near the hydrogen burning limit are presented. Individual deep CCD high galactic latitude…
I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…