Related papers: High Precision Astrometry with Adaptive Optics aid…
As astronomers, we are living an exciting time for what concerns the search for other worlds. Recent discoveries have already deeply impacted our vision of planetary formation and architectures. Future bio-signature discoveries will…
Searching for extrasolar planets by direct detection is extremely challenging for current instrumentation. Indirect methods, that measure the effect of a planet on its host star, are much more promising and have indeed led to the discovery…
The detection and characterization of habitable planets around nearby stars persist as one of the foremost objectives in contemporary astrophysics. This work investigates the synergistic integration of astrometric and direct imaging…
We are at a unique timeline in the history of human evolution where we may be able to discover earth-like planets around stars outside our solar system where conditions can support life or even find evidence of life on those planets. With…
The physical characterization of exoplanets will require to take spectra at several orbital positions. For that purpose, a direct imaging capability is necessary. Direct imaging requires an efficient stellar suppression mechanism,…
The Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey is designed to observe every Kepler planet candidate host star with laser adaptive optics imaging to search for blended nearby stars, which may be physically associated companions and/or…
The next generation of ground-based instruments aims to break through the knowledge we have on exoplanets by imaging circumstellar environments always closer to the stars. However, direct imaging requires an AO system and high-contrast…
Context: Planets outside our solar system transiting their host star, i. e. those with an orbital inclination near 90 degree, are of special interest to derive physical properties of extrasolar planets. With the knowledge of the host star's…
Being one of the most fundamental physical parameter of astronomical objects, mass plays a vital role in the study of exoplanets, including their temperature structure, chemical composition, formation, and evolution. However, nearly a…
The Extremely Large Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope will use state of the art multiconjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems to obtain the full D4 advantage that their apertures can provide. However, to reach the full astrometric…
The precise Doppler method for measuring stellar radial velocities (RV) is a fundamental technique in modern astronomy. This method records a star's spectrum and detects periodic Doppler shifts in its spectral features, which indicate the…
Extremely precise radial velocity is essential for the detection of sub-m/s radial velocity of stars induced by Earth-like planets. Although modeling of the barycentric correction of radial velocity could achieve 1 mm/s precision, the input…
We present a new method for differentiating between planetary transits and eclipsing binaries based on the presence of the ellipsoidal light variations. These variations can be used to detect stellar secondaries with masses ~0.2 M_sun…
Cross-correlation is a well-tested method for exoplanet characterization. A new, potentially powerful application is the measurement of atmospheric isotope ratios. In particular D/H can give unique insights into a planet's formation and…
We obtain full information on the orbital parameters by combining radial velocity and astrometric measurements by means of Bayesian inference. We sample the parameter probability densities of orbital model parameters with a Markov chain…
Ground-based photometric surveys have led to the discovery of six transiting exoplanets, five of which were detected by the OGLE survey. The FLAMES multi-object spectrograph on the VLT has permitted a very efficient follow-up of the OGLE…
The Portable Adaptive Optics (PAO) is a low-cost and compact system, designed for 4-meter class telescopes that have no Adaptive Optics (AO), because of the physical space limitation at the Nasmyth or Cassegrain focus and the historically…
Aims. We present a solution to improve the performance of coronagraphs for the detection of exo-planets. Methods. We simulate numerically several kinds of coronagraphic systems, with the aim of evaluating the gain obtained with an adaptive…
The largest and most close-in exoplanets would reflect enough star light to enable its ground-based photometric detection under the condition of a high to moderate albedo. We present the results of an observing campaign of secondary eclipse…
Direct imaging of extra-solar planets has now become a reality, especially with the deployment and commissioning of the first generation of specialized ground-based instruments such as the GPI, SPHERE, P1640 and SCExAO. These systems will…