Related papers: Direct exoplanet detection and characterization us…

Direct detection, also known as direct imaging, is a method for discovering and characterizing the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations. It is the only means of obtaining spectra of non-transiting exoplanets.…

Direct imaging of circumstellar disks requires high-contrast and high-resolution techniques. The angular differential imaging (ADI) technique is one of them, initially developed for point-like sources but now increasingly applied to…

Substellar companions such as exoplanets and brown dwarfs exhibit changes in brightness arising from top-of-atmosphere inhomogeneities, providing insights into their atmospheric structure and dynamics. This variability can be measured in…

Direct imaging and spectroscopy is the likely means by which we will someday identify, confirm, and characterize an Earth-like planet around a nearby Sun-like star. This Chapter summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding…

Most of the high-contrast imaging (HCI) data-processing techniques used over the last 15 years have relied on the angular differential imaging (ADI) observing strategy, along with subtraction of a reference point spread function (PSF) to…

Imaging circumstellar disks in the near-infrared provides unprecedented information about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. However, current post-processing techniques for high-contrast imaging using ground-based telescopes…

Current detection methods of planetary companions do not allow retrieving their spectral information properties. The method of Differential Interferometry has the potential to complement such information by comparing interferometric…

The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…

SPHERE (Spectro Polarimetric High contrast Exoplanet REsearch), the planet finder instrument for the VLT is designed to study relatively bright extrasolar giant planets around young or nearby stars. SPHERE is a set of three instruments fed…

Detecting the faint emission of a secondary source in the proximity of the much brighter source has been the most severe obstacle for using direct imaging in searching for exoplanets. Using quantum state discrimination and quantum imaging…

Future space telescopes may be able to directly image $\sim$10 - 100 planets with sizes and orbits consistent with habitable surface conditions ("exo-Earth candidates" or EECs), but observers will face difficulty in distinguishing these…

Context. High-contrast exoplanet imaging is a rapidly growing field as can be seen through the significant resources invested. In fact, the detection and characterization of exoplanets through direct imaging is featured at all major…

Our ability to observe, detect, and characterize exoplanetary atmospheres has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, aided largely by developments in astronomical instrumentation; improvements in data analysis techniques; and an…

RISTRETTO is a visible high-resolution spectrograph fed by an extreme adaptive optics (AO) system, to be proposed as a visitor instrument on ESO VLT. The main science goal of RISTRETTO is to pioneer the detection and atmospheric…

The NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has returned petabytes of lunar high spatial resolution surface imagery over the past decade, impractical for humans to fully review manually. Here we develop an automated method using a deep…

The characterization of planetary atmospheres is a daunting task, pushing current observing facilities to their limits. The next generation of high-resolution spectrographs mounted on large telescopes -- such as ESPRESSO@VLT and HIRES@ELT…

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…

Context: The conventional approach to direct imaging has been the use of a single aperture coronagraph with wavefront correction via extreme adaptive optics. Such systems are limited to observing beyond an inner working (IWA) of a few…

Background. Relative astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with a 1m class space telescope has been repeatedly proposed as a tool for exo-planet detection and characterization, as well as for several topics at the forefront of…

Time-resolved photometry is an important new probe of the physics of condensate clouds in extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs. Extreme adaptive optics systems can directly image planets, but precise brightness measurements are challenging.…