Related papers: APF - The Lick Observatory Automated Planet Finder
Alpha Centauri A is the closest solar-type star to the Sun and offers an excellent opportunity to detect the thermal emission of a mature planet heated by its host star. The MIRI coronagraph on JWST can search the 1-3 AU (1"-2") region…
Doppler spectroscopy has uncovered or confirmed all the known planets orbiting nearby stars. Two main techniques are used to obtain precision Doppler measurements at optical wavelengths. The first approach is the gas cell method, which…
The Spectrograph of the RISTRETTO instrument is now currently being manufactured. RISTETTO is an instrument designed to detect and characterize the reflected light of nearby exoplanets. It combines high contrast imaging and high resolution…
We present an algorithm to search for the faint spectrum of a second star mixed with the spectrum of a brighter star in high resolution spectra. We model optical stellar spectra as the sum of two input spectra drawn from a vast library of…
The Dharma Planet Survey (DPS) aims to monitor about 150 nearby very bright FGKM dwarfs (within 50 pc) during 2016$-$2020 for low-mass planet detection and characterization using the TOU very high resolution optical spectrograph…
Existing and planned optical telescopes and surveys can detect artificially-illuminated objects comparable in total brightness to a major terrestrial city out to the outskirts of the Solar System. Orbital parameters of Kuiper belt objects…
Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…
The Solar System contains a population of dust and small particles originating from asteroids, comets, and other bodies. These particles have been studied using a number of techniques ranging from in-situ satellite detectors to analysis of…
Associated Particle Imaging (API) is a nuclear technique that allows for the nondestructive determination of 3D isotopic distributions. The technique is based on the detection of the alpha particles associated with the neutron emitted in…
Insufficient instrument thermo-mechanical stability is one of the many roadblocks for achieving 10cm/s Doppler radial velocity (RV) precision, the precision needed to detect Earth-twins orbiting Solar-type stars. Highly temperature and…
AKARI (formerly ASTRO-F) is an infrared space telescope designed for an all-sky survey at 10-180 (mu)m, and deep pointed surveys of selected areas at 2-180 (mu)m. The deep pointed surveys with AKARI will significantly advance our…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…
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 Kepler Mission is searching for Earth-size planets orbiting solar-like stars by simultaneously observing >160,000 stars to detect sequences of transit events in the photometric light curves. The Combined Differential Photometric…
The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a fully-automated, wide-field survey aimed at a systematic exploration of the optical transient sky. The transient survey is performed using a new 8.1 square degree camera installed on the 48-inch…
The Habitable zone Planet Finder (HPF) is a fiber fed precise radial velocity spectrograph at the 10 m Hobby Eberly Telescope (HET). Due to its fixed altitude design, the HET pupil changes appreciably across a track, leading to significant…
NASA's \textit{Kepler} primary mission observed about 116 $deg^2$ in the sky for 3.5 consecutive years to discover Earth-like exoplanets. This mission recorded pixel cutouts, known as Target Pixel Files (TPFs), of over $200,000$ targets…
We present the first astronomical observations obtained with an Apodizing Phase Plate (APP). The plate is designed to suppress the stellar diffraction pattern by 5 magnitudes from 2-9 lambda/D over a 180 degree region. Stellar images were…
Automated method of full spectrum fitting gives reliable estimates of stellar atmospheric parameters (Teff, logg and [Fe/H]) for late A, F, G and early K type stars. Recently, the technique was further improved in the cooler regime and the…
The Kepler mission has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets, but some of the planet candidates identified by Kepler may actually be astrophysical false positives or planets whose transit depths are diluted by the presence of…