Related papers: A New High Contrast Imaging Program at Palomar Obs…
High contrast imaging is the primary path to the direct detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around solar-type stars; a cleverly designed internal coronagraph suppresses the light from the star, revealing the elusive…
RISTRETTO is the evolution of the original idea of coupling the VLT instruments SPHERE and ESPRESSO, aiming at High Dispersion Coronagraphy. RISTRETTO is a visitor instrument that should enable the characterization of the atmospheres of…
In this first of a two-paper sequence, we report techniques and results of the Cornell High-order Adaptive Optics Survey for brown dwarf companions (CHAOS). At the time of this writing, this study represents the most sensitive published…
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…
Direct exo-Earth imaging is a key science goal for astronomy in the next decade. This ambitious task imposes a target contrast of ~10^-7 at wavelengths from I to J-band. In our prior study, we determined that polarization aberrations can…
High-contrast imaging observations are fundamentally limited by the spatially and temporally correlated noise source called speckles. Suppression of speckle noise is the key goal of wavefront control and adaptive optics (AO), coronagraphy,…
Detection and characterization of exoplanets by direct imaging requires a coronagraph designed to deliver high contrast at small angular separation. To achieve this, an accurate control of low order aberrations, such as pointing and focus…
Combining high-contrast imaging with medium-resolution spectroscopy has been shown to significantly boost the direct detection of exoplanets. HARMONI, one of the first-light instruments to be mounted on ESO's ELT, will be equipped with a…
Observations of low-mass companions for which the dynamical masses are well constrained help to improve the calibration of evolutionary models. Such observations thereby provide more confidence in the estimation of the mass of a companion…
The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) is a new visible-wavelength testbed designed to advance the state of the art in wavefront control for high contrast imaging on large, segmented, ground-based telescopes. SEAL provides multiple options…
All coronagraphic instruments for exoplanet high-contrast imaging need wavefront correction systems to reject optical aberrations and create sufficiently dark holes. Since the most efficient wavefront correction algorithms (controllers and…
We introduce a new class of solutions for Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraphs (APLC) with segmented aperture telescopes to remove broadband diffracted light from a star with a contrast level of $10^{10}$. These new coronagraphs provide a key…
Direct imaging and spectroscopy of Earth-like planets and young Jupiters require contrasts up to 10^6-10^10 at angular separations of a few dozen milliarcseconds. To achieve this goal, one of the most promising approaches consists of using…
High contrast imaging and spectroscopy provide unique constraints for exoplanet formation models as well as for planetary atmosphere models. But this can be challenging because of the planet-to-star small angular separation and high flux…
Characterization of directly imaged exoplanets is one of the most eagerly anticipated science functions of the James Webb Space Telescope. MIRI, the mid-IR instrument has the capability to provide unique spatially resolved photometric data…
Context: High contrast imaging is a powerful technique to detect and characterize planetary companions at large orbital separations from their parent stars. Aims: We aim at studying the limiting magnitude of the VLT/SPHERE Adaptive Optics…
We describe the results from a new instrument which combines Lucky Imaging and Adaptive Optics to give the first routine direct diffraction-limited imaging in the visible on a 5m telescope. With fast image selection behind the Palomar AO…
As adaptive optics technology continues to improve, the stellar coronagraph will play an ever increasing role in ground-based high-contrast imaging observations. Though several different image masks exist for the most common type of…
Extra-solar planets have not been imaged directly with existing ground or space telescopes because they are too faint to be seen against the halo of the nearby bright star. Most techniques being explored to suppress the halo are achromatic,…
The imaging and characterization of a larger range of exoplanets, down to young Jupiters and exo-Earths will require accessing very high contrasts at small angular separations with an increased robustness to aberrations, three constraints…