Related papers: Multi-Aperture Imaging of Extrasolar Planetary Sys…
The next generation of high-contrast imaging instruments will provide the first unresolved image of an extrasolar planet. While the emitted infrared light from the planet in thermal equilibrium should show almost no phase effect, the…
The detection of exoplanets in coronographic images is severely limited by residual starlight speckles. Dedicated post-processing can drastically reduce this "stellar leakage" and thereby increase the faintness of detectable exoplanets.…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
Intensity interferometry removes the stringent requirements on mechanical precision and atmospheric corrections that plague all amplitude interferometry techniques at the cost of severely limited sensitivity. A new idea we recently…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents both significant challenges and significant gains. The advantages primarily lie in receiving emitted and, with future instruments, reflected photons at phase angles not accessible by other techniques,…
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…
Optical interferometry is a powerful tool to investigate the close environment of AGB stars. With a spatial resolution of a few milli-arcseconds, it is even possible to image directly the surface of angularly large objects. This is of…
Gravitational microlensing is one of the methods to detect exoplanets; planets outside our solar system. Here we focus on theoretical modeling of three lens systems and in particular circumbinary systems. Circumbinary systems include two…
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.…
The study of the interstellar medium (ISM) in the X-rays has entered a golden age with the advent of the X-ray observatories XMM-Newton and Chandra. High-energy resolution allowed to study dust spectroscopic features with unprecedented…
The space-time correlations of streams of photons can provide fundamentally new channels of information about the Universe. Today's astronomical observations essentially measure certain amplitude coherence functions produced by a source.…
Microlensing offers a unique opportunity to probe exoplanets that are temperate and beyond the snow line, as small as Jovian satellites, at extragalactic distance, and even free floating exoplanets, regimes where the sensitivity of other…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
Active comets have been detected in several exoplanetary systems, although so far only indirectly, when the dust or gas in the extended coma has transited in front of the stellar disk. The large optical surface and relatively high…
Modern optical spectrographs and optical interferometers push the limits in the spectral and spatial regime, providing important new tools for the exploration of the universe. In this contribution I outline the complementary nature of…
Interferometry in the optical and near infrared has so far played a marginal role in Extragalactic Astronomy. Active Galactic Nuclei are the brightest and most compact extragalactic sources, nonetheless only a very limited number could be…
Asteroseismology of solar-type stars has an important part to play in the exoplanet program of the NASA Kepler Mission. Precise and accurate inferences on the stellar properties that are made possible by the seismic data allow very tight…
Infrared space interferometers can surpass the spatial resolution limitations of single-dish space telescopes. However, stellar interferometers from space have not been realized because of technical difficulties. Two beams coming from…
Interferometry is one of the most powerful experimental tools of modern astrophysics. Some of its methods are considered in view of potential applicability to studies of correlations in multiparticle dynamics.