Related papers: Single mode, extreme precision Doppler spectrograp…

Owing to technological advances, the number of exoplanets discovered has risen dramatically in the last few years. However, when trying to observe Earth analogs, it is often difficult to test the veracity of detection. We have developed a…

Direct exoplanet detection is limited by speckle noise in the point spread function (PSF) of the central star. This noise can be reduced by subtracting PSF images obtained simultaneously in adjacent narrow spectral bands using a…

Searches for extrasolar planets using the periodic Doppler shift of stellar spectral lines have recently achieved a precision of 60 cm/s (ref 1), which is sufficient to find a 5-Earth-mass planet in a Mercury-like orbit around a Sun-like…

(shortened for arXiv) We aim to progress towards more efficient exoplanet detection around active stars by optimizing the use of Doppler Imaging in radial velocity measurements. We propose a simple method to simultaneously extract a…

Speckle imaging is a well known method to achieve diffraction-limited (DL) imaging from ground-based telescopes. The traditional observing method for speckle has been to observe a single, unresolved, source per telescope pointing over a…

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…

Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…

Instrumentation designed to characterize potentially habitable planets may combine adaptive optics and high-resolution spectroscopy techniques to achieve the highest possible sensitivity to spectral signs of life. Detecting the weak signal…

The next generation of exoplanet-hunting spectrographs should deliver up to an order of magnitude improvement in radial velocity precision over the standard 1 m/s state of the art. This advance is critical for enabling the detection of…

The MPF mission will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses greater than 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar System's planets except for Mercury, as…

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,…

High-resolution Doppler spectroscopy provides an avenue to study the atmosphere of both transiting and non-transiting planets. This powerful method has also yielded some of the most robust atmospheric detections to date. Currently,…

The direct detection of exoplanets with high-contrast instruments can be boosted with high spectral resolution. For integral field spectrographs yielding hyperspectral data, this means that the field of view consists of diffracted starlight…

Linking a coronagraph instrument to a spectrograph via a single mode optical fiber is a pathway towards detailed characterization of exoplanet atmospheres with current and future ground- and space-based telescopes. However, given the…

A next generation of space-based observatories aims to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars using reflected light spectroscopy. However, it remains unclear how such direct imaging…

We are still in the early days of exoplanet discovery. Astronomers are beginning to model the atmospheres and interiors of exoplanets and have developed a deeper understanding of processes of planet formation and evolution. However, we have…

Aims. We present simulations of the perfomances of the future SPHERE IFS instrument designed for imaging extrasolar planets in the near infrared (Y, J, and H bands). Methods. We used the IDL package code for adaptive optics simulation…

We demonstrate spectroscopy of incoherent light with sub-diffraction resolution. In a proof-of-principle experiment we analyze the spectrum of a pair of incoherent point-like sources whose separation is below the diffraction limit. The two…

We investigate a new scheme for astronomical spectrograph calibration using the laser frequency comb at the Solar Vacuum Tower Telescope on Tenerife. Our concept is based upon a single-mode fiber channel, that simultaneously feeds the…

The direct detection of exoplanets has been the subject of intensive research in the recent years. Data obtained with future high-contrast imaging instruments optimized for giant planets direct detection are strongly limited by the speckle…