Related papers: Simultaneous exoplanet detection and instrument ab…
At optical wavelengths, an exoplanet's signature is essentially reflected light from the host star - several orders of magnitude fainter. Since it is superimposed on the star spectrum its detection has been a difficult observational…
We research the requirements of High Contrast Imaging when combined with the cross correlation (CC) of high resolution spectra with known spectroscopic templates for detecting and characterising exoplanets in reflected light. We simulate…
Image Rotation and Subtraction (IRS) is a high-contrast imaging technique which can be used to suppress the speckles noise and facilitate the direct detection of exoplanets. IRS is different from Angular Differential Imaging (ADI), in which…
Space-based stellar coronagraph instruments aim to directly image exoplanets that are a fraction of an arcsecond separation and ten billion times fainter than their host star. To achieve this, one or more deformable mirrors (DMs) are used…
The recovery of an exoplanet's atmospheric parameters from its spectrum requires accurate knowledge of the spectral errors and covariances. Unfortunately, the complex image processing used in high-contrast integral-field spectrograph (IFS)…
This paper introduces an analytical method to calculate segment-level wavefront error tolerances in order to enable the detection of faint extra-solar planets using segmented telescopes in space. This study provides a full treatment of…
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…
Discovering exoplanets in orbit around distant stars via direct imaging is fundamentally impeded by the combined effect of optical diffraction and photon shot noise under extreme star-planet contrast. Coronagraphs strive to increase the…
Future large space- or ground-based telescopes will offer the resolution and sensitivity to probe the habitable zone of a large sample of nearby stars for exo-Earth imaging. To this end, such facilities are expected to be equipped with a…
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…
The vortex coronagraph is an optical instrument that precisely removes on-axis starlight allowing for high contrast imaging at small angular separation from the star, thereby providing a crucial capability for direct detection and…
In two-dimensional spectrographs, the optical distortions in the spatial and dispersion directions produce variations in the sub-pixel sampling of the background spectrum. Using knowledge of the camera distortions and the curvature of the…
The high contrast and spatial resolution requirements for directly imaging exoplanets requires effective coordination of wavefront control, coronagraphy, observation techniques, and post-processing algorithms. However, even with this suite…
Circumstellar disks play a key role in the understanding of stellar systems. Direct imaging of such extended structures is a challenging task. Current post-processing techniques, first tailored for exoplanets imaging, tend to produce…
The accumulation of aberrations along the optical path in a telescope produces distortions and speckles in the resulting images, limiting the performance of cameras at high angular resolution. It is important to achieve the highest possible…
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…
Using 2 aspheric mirrors, it is possible to apodize a telescope beam without losing light or angular resolution: the output beam is produced by ``remapping'' the entrance beam to produce the desired light intensity distribution in a new…
The detection and characterisation of extra-solar planets is a major theme driving modern astronomy, with the vast majority of such measurements being achieved by Doppler radial-velocity and transit observations. Another technique -- direct…
Exploring exoplanets has transformed our understanding of the universe by revealing many planetary systems that defy our current understanding. To study their atmospheres, spectroscopic observations are used to infer essential atmospheric…
The detection of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, and their spectroscopic characterization in a search for biosignatures, requires starlight suppression that exceeds the current best ground-based performance by…