Related papers: Utilizing Astrometric Orbits to Obtain Coronagraph…
Directly imaging extrasolar planets using a monolithic optical telescope avoids many pitfalls of space interferometry and opens up the prospect of visible light studies of extrasolar planetary systems. Future astronomical missions may…
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…
High-contrast imaging observations of large angular diameter stars enable complementary science questions to be addressed compared to the baseline goals of proposed missions like the Terrestrial Planet Finder-Coronagraph, New World's…
Space astrometry is capable of sub-microarcsecond measurements of star positions. A hundred visits over several years could yield relative astrometric precision of ~0.1 uas, below the astrometric signature (0.3 uas) of a Sun-Earth system at…
I derive analytic scalings for coronagraphic imaging searches for extrasolar planets. I compute the efficiency of detecting planets about any given star, and from this compute dimensionless distribution functions for the detected planets as…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
We propose the application of coronagraphic techniques to the spectroscopic direct detection of exoplanets via the Doppler shift of planetary molecular lines. Even for an unresolved close-in planetary system, we show that the combination of…
Context: Occultations of stars by asteroids are an efficient method to study the properties of minor bodies, and can be exploited as tools to derive very precise asteroid astrometry relative to the target star. With the availability of…
Nearby giant exoplanets offer an opportunity to search for moons (exomoons) orbiting them. Here, we present a simulation framework for investigating the possibilities of detecting exomoons via their astrometric signal in planet-to-star…
We report new methods for evaluating realistic observing programs that search stars for planets by direct imaging, where observations are selected from an optimized star list, and where stars can be observed multiple times. We show how…
High contrast imaging searches for exoplanets have been conducted on 2.4-10 m telescopes, typically at H band (1.6 microns) and used exposure times of ~1 hr to search for planets with semi-major axes of > ~10 AU. We are beginning to plan…
General arguments for optimized coronagraphy in the search for planets are presented. First, off-axis telescopes provide the best telescopic platforms for use with coronagraphy, and telescope fabrication technology now allows the…
We present a procedure for calculating expected exoplanet imaging yields, which explicitly separates the effects of instrument performance from assumptions of planet distributions. This `depth of search' approach allows for fast…
In this article, theory-based analytical methodologies of astrophysics employed in the modern era are suitably operated alongside a test research-grade telescope to image and determine the orbit of a near-earth asteroid from original…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will make precise astrometric measurements that can be used to detect planets around nearby stars. Since observational time will be extremely valuable, it is important to consider how the choice of the…
Many high contrast coronagraph designs have recently been proposed. In this paper, their suitability for direct imaging of extrasolar terrestrial planets is reviewed. We also develop a linear-algebra based model of coronagraphy that can…
We investigate lens orbital motion in astrometric microlensing and its detectability. In microlensing events, the light centroid shift in the source trajectory (the astrometric trajectory) falls off much more slowly than the light…
High-precision astrometry can identify exoplanets and measure their orbits and masses, while coronagraphic imaging enables detailed characterization of their physical properties and atmospheric compositions through spectroscopy. In a…
We report a method that uses "completeness" to estimate the number of exrasolar planets discovered by an observing program with a direct-imaging instrument. We develop a completeness function for Earth-like planets on "habitable" orbits for…
(Abridged) The probability of detecting additional companions is essentially unchanged with respect to the single-planet configurations, but after fitting and subtraction of orbits with astrometric signal-to-noise ratio $\alpha/\sigma_d\to…