Related papers: High Contrast Observations of Bright Stars with a …
Starshades are a leading technology to enable the detection and spectroscopic characterization of Earth-like exoplanets. In this paper we report on optical experiments of sub-scale starshades that advance critical starlight suppression…
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…
High-contrast observations in optical and infrared astronomy are defined as any observation requiring a technique to reveal a celestial object of interest that is in such close angular proximity to another source brighter by a factor of at…
A star's luminosity increases as it evolves along the Main Sequence (MS), which inevitably results in a higher surface temperature for planets in orbit around the star. Technologically advanced civilizations may tackle this issue by…
Starshade is one of the technologies that will enable the observation and characterization of small planets around nearby stars through direct imaging. The Starshade Exoplanetary Data Challenge (SEDC) was designed to validate…
A key challenge for starshades is formation flying. To successfully image exoplanets, the telescope boresight and starshade must be aligned to ~1 m at separations of tens of thousands of kilometers. This challenge has two parts: first, the…
Imaging terrestrial exoplanets around nearby stars is a formidable technical challenge, requiring the development of coronagraphs to suppress the stellar halo of diffracted light at the location of the planet. In this review, we derive the…
We explore the capabilities of a starshade mission to directly image multi-star systems. In addition to the diffracted and scattered light for the on-axis star, a multi-star system features additional starlight leakage from the off-axis…
Stars with debris disks are intriguing targets for direct imaging exoplanet searches, both due to previous detections of wide planets in debris disk systems, as well as commonly existing morphological features in the disks themselves that…
Starshade in formation flight with a space telescope is a rapidly maturing technology that would enable imaging and spectral characterization of small planets orbiting nearby stars in the not-too-distant future. While performance models of…
Detecting exoplanets and other faint sources of emitted and reflected light near a bright star requires deeply suppressing the starlight while efficiently transmitting the dim light from its surroundings. This suppression can be carried out…
Although many exoplanets have been indirectly detected over the last years, direct imaging of them with ground-based telescopes remains challenging. In the presence of atmospheric fluctuations, it is ambitious to resolve the high brightness…
A starshade suppresses starlight by a factor of 1E11 in the image plane of a telescope, which is crucial for directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets. The state of the art in high contrast post-processing and signal detection methods were…
The Roman Space Telescope will be a critical mission to demonstrate high-contrast imaging technologies allowing for the characterisation of exoplanets in reflected light. It will demonstrate $10^{-7}$ contrast limits or better at 3--9…
High-contrast imaging enabled by a starshade in formation flight with a space telescope can provide a near-term pathway to search for and characterize temperate and small planets of nearby stars. NASA's Starshade Technology Development…
The high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging earth-like exoplanet at the visible needs a contrast of 10^(-10) at a small angular separation of 4 lambda/D or less. Here we report our recent laboratory experiment that is close to 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…
This tutorial is an introduction to High-Contrast Imaging, a technique that enables astronomers to isolate light from faint planets and/or circumstellar disks that would otherwise be lost amidst the light of their host stars. Although…
Direct imaging is the primary technique currently used to detect young and warm exoplanets and understand their formation scenarios. The extreme flux ratio between an exoplanet and its host star requires the use of coronagraphs to attenuate…
We summarize the current best polychromatic (10 to 20 % bandwidth) contrast performance demonstrated in the laboratory by different starlight suppression approaches and systems designed to directly characterize exoplanets around nearby…