Related papers: Analytic Modeling of Starshades
The photometric transit method has been the most effective method to detect and characterize exoplanets as several ground-based as well as space-based survey missions have discovered thousands of exoplanets using this method. With the…
The primary objective of this paper is to construct an analytical model for determining the total duration of eclipse events of satellites. The approach assumes that the trace formed in the orbital plane, cutting body shadow under the…
This paper is based on the opening lecture given at the 2017 edition of the Evry Schatzman school on high-angular resolution imaging of stars and their direct environment. Two relevant observing techniques: long baseline interferometry and…
We explore the capabilities of a starshade mission to directly image multi-star systems. In addition to the diffracted and scattered light for the on-axis star, a multi-star system features additional starlight leakage from the off-axis…
The shapelets method for image analysis is based upon the decomposition of localised objects into a series of orthogonal components with convenient mathematical properties. We extend the "Cartesian shapelet" formalism from earlier work, and…
The next generation of exoplanet space photometry missions proposed by both NASA and ESA promise to discover small transiting planets around the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars. The physical and rotational properties of these…
I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…
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.…
A key to understand exoplanets is characterisation of their host stars. One of the most powerful tools to characterise stellar properties like effective temperature, surface gravity and metallicity, is spectroscopy based on observations of…
New observational facilities are becoming increasingly capable of observing reflected light from transiting and directly imaged extrasolar planets. In this study, we provide an analytic framework to interpret observed phase curves,…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
The mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star and the…
The last decade has seen a revolution in the field of asteroseismology - the study of stellar pulsations. It has become a powerful method to precisely characterise exoplanet host stars, and as a consequence also the exoplanets themselves.…
Optical tweezers are powerful tools based on focused laser beams. They are able to trap, manipulate and investigate a wide range of microscopic and nanoscopic particles in different media, such as liquids, air, and vacuum. Key applications…
Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…
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…
The spectroscopy of faint planetary-mass companions to nearby stars is one of the main challenges that new-generation high-contrast spectro-imagers are going to face. In a previous work we presented a long slit coronagraph (LSC), for which…
For exoplanet direct detection mission concepts such as Terrestrial Planet Finder or Exoplanet Probe, light from the exozodiacal dust tends to obscure any exoplanets present in the image. Data analysis methods to identify point sources…
With a new generation of observatories coming online this decade, the process of characterizing exoplanet atmospheres will need to be reinvented. Currently mostly on the instrumental side, characterization bottlenecks will soon stand by the…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…