Related papers: PHASES: a concept for a satellite-borne ultra-prec…

Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…

Future missions like Roman, HabEx, and LUVOIR will directly image exoplanets in reflected light. While current near infrared direct imaging searches are only sensitive to young, self-luminous planets whose brightness is independent of their…

Orbital solutions for binary or multiple stellar systems that combine astrometry (e.g., position angles and angular separations) with spectroscopy (radial velocities) have important advantages over astrometric-only or spectroscopic-only…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is conducting a two-year wide-field survey searching for transiting exoplanets around nearby bright stars that will be ideal for follow-up characterization. To facilitate studies of planet…

Transition-edge sensors (TESs) are capable of highly accurate single particle energy measurement. TESs have been used for a wide range of photon detection applications, particularly in astronomy, but very little consideration has been given…

Orbital monitoring of exoplanetary and stellar systems is fundamental for analysing their architecture, dynamical stability and evolution, and mechanisms of formation. Current high-contrast extreme-adaptive optics imagers like SPHERE, GPI,…

We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…

The new planet finder for the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE), just had its first light in Paranal. A dedicated instrument for the direct detection of planets, SPHERE, is…

An international group of scientists has begun planning for the Planet Formation Imager (PFI, www.planetformationimager.org), a next-generation infrared interferometer array with the primary goal of imaging the active phases of planet…

Spectroscopy is one of the most important tools that an astronomer has for studying the universe. This chapter begins by discussing the basics, including the different types of optical spectrographs, with extension to the ultraviolet and…

ESPaDOnS is a new-generation cross-dispersed echelle spectropolarimeter, the commissioning phase of which is scheduled at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) for spring 2004. This instrument will provide full coverage of the optical…

The HERMES high-resolution spectrograph project aims at exploiting the specific potential of small but flexible telescopes in observational astrophysics. The optimised optical design of the spectrograph is based on the well-proven concept…

The SPEAR (or 'FIMS') instrumentation has been used to conduct the first large-scale spectral mapping of diffuse cosmic far ultraviolet (FUV, 900-1750 AA) emission, including important diagnostics of interstellar hot (10^4 K - 10^6 K) and…

Stellar activity causes difficulties in the characterization of transiting exoplanets. Studies have been performed to quantify its impact on infrared interferometry, but not in the visible domain, which however allows reaching better…

SCALES (Slicer Combined with an Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy) is a 2 to 5 micron high-contrast lenslet-based Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) designed to characterize exoplanets and their atmospheres. Like other…

For distant stars, as observed by the NASA Kepler satellite, parallax information is currently of fairly low quality and is not complete. This limits the precision with which the absolute sizes of the stars and their potential transiting…

Asteroseismology involves probing the interiors of stars and quantifying their global properties, such as radius and age, through observationsof normal modes of oscillation. The technical requirements for conducting asteroseismology include…

We propose a new concept for spectral characterization of transiting exoplanets with future space-based telescopes. This concept, called as densified pupil spectroscopy, allows us to perform high, stable spectrophotometry against telescope…

The need of atmospheric information with a higher spatial and temporal resolution drives the development of small satellites and satellite constellations to complement satellite flagship missions. Since optical systems are a main…

Astrometry as a technique has so far proved of limited utility when employed as either a follow-up tool or to independently search for planetary mass companions orbiting nearby stars. However, this is bound to change during the next decade.…