Related papers: Affordable spectroscopy for 1m-class telescopes
Observations of extrasolar planets using Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS), if coupled with an extreme Adaptive Optics system and analyzed with a Simultaneous Differential Imaging technique (SDI), are a powerful tool to detect and…
The coolest dwarf stars are intrinsically faint at visible wavelengths and exhibit rotationally modulated stellar activity from spots and plages. It is advantageous to observe these stars at near infrared (NIR) wavelengths (1-2.5 microns)…
As the first successful technique used to detect exoplanets orbiting distant stars, the Radial Velocity Method aims to detect a periodic Doppler shift in a star's spectrum. We introduce a new, mathematically rigorous, approach to detect…
The dark-speckle method (Labeyrie 1995) combines features of speckle interferometry and adaptive optics to provide images of faint circumstellar material. We present preliminary results of observations, and simulations concluding to the…
The comparison of optical reference frequency signals over free-space optical links is limited by the relative motion between local and remote sites. For ground to low earth orbit comparison, the expected Doppler shift and Doppler rate…
Radial velocities measured from near-infrared spectra are a potentially powerful tool to search for planets around cool stars and sub-stellar objects. However, no technique currently exists that yields near-infrared radial velocity…
During the last few years, considerable effort has been directed towards large-scale (>> $1 Billion US) missions to detect and characterize earth-like planets around nearby stars, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I)…
The Echelle spectrograph operating at Vainu Bappu Telescope (VBT) is a general purpose instrument designed for high resolution spectroscopy. It is being considered for precision Doppler measurements without altering the existing design and…
Aims: Stellar activity may complicate the analysis of high-precision radial-velocity spectroscopic data when looking for exoplanets signatures. We aim at quantifying the impact of stellar spots on stars with various spectral types and…
The determination of extrasolar planet masses with the radial velocity (RV) technique requires spectroscopic Doppler information from the planet's host star, which varies with stellar brightness and temperature. We analyze Doppler…
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.…
NASA's Kepler Mission promises to detect transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of solar-like stars. In addition, it will be poised to detect the reflected light component from close-in extrasolar giant planets (CEGPs)…
This paper presents an orbital analysis of six southern single-lined spectroscopic binary systems. The systems selected were shown to have circular or nearly circular orbits (e < 0.1) from earlier published solutions of only moderate…
Rapid planetary rotation can cause the equilibrium shape of a planet to be oblate. While planetary oblateness has mostly been probed by examining the subtle ingress and egress features in photometric transit light curves, we investigate the…
Transits of bright stars offer a unique opportunity to study detailed properties of extrasolar planets that cannot be determined through radial-velocity observations. We propose a technique to find such systems using all-sky small-aperture…
We propose to use low-rank matrix approximation using the component-wise L1-norm for direct imaging of exoplanets. Exoplanet detection by direct imaging is a challenging task for three main reasons: (1) the host star is several orders of…
We present the design and testing of a prototype in-plane echelle spectrograph based on an actively controlled fibre-fed double-pass design. This system aims to be small and efficient with the minimum number of optical surfaces - currently…
There are different methods for finding exoplanets such as radial spectral shifts, astrometrical measurements, transits, timing etc. Gravitational microlensing (including pixel-lensing) is among the most promising techniques with the…
Stellar activity interferes with precise radial velocity measurements and limits our ability to detect and characterize planets, particularly Earth-like planets. We introduce \aestra (Auto-Encoding STellar Radial-velocity and Activity), a…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…