Related papers: The direct imaging search for Earth 2.0: Quantifyi…
The probability of the detection of Earth-like exoplanets may increase in the near future after the launch of the space missions using the transit photometry as observation method. By using this technique only the semi-major axis of the…
The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
The detection of massive planets orbiting nearby stars has become almost routine, but current techniques are as yet unable to detect terrestrial planets with masses comparable to the Earth's. Future space-based observatories to detect…
Ground-based telescopes coupled with adaptive optics (AO) have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the…
The challenge for optical detection of terrestial planet is the 25 magnitude brightness contrast between the planet and its host star. This paper introduces a new pupil design that produces a very dark null along its symmetry axis. By…
Recent advances have enabled the discovery of a population of potentially Earth-like planets, yet their orbital eccentricity, which governs their climate and provides clues about their origin and dynamical history, is still largely…
We have surveyed all conventional methods proposed or conceivable for obtaining resolved images of an Earth-like exoplanet. Generating a 10 x 10 pixel map of a 1 R_E world at 10 pc demands ~0.85 uas angular resolution and photon-collection…
Radial velocity and transit methods are effective for the study of short orbital period exoplanets but they hardly probe objects at large separations for which direct imaging can be used. We carried out the international deep planet survey…
Exoplanet occurrence rates facilitate comparisons between observations of planets and theoretical models of planet formation. Despite their deductive power, exoplanet occurrence rates for half the stars in the sky are missing because…
Zechmeister et al. (2009) surveyed 38 nearby M dwarfs from March 2000 to March 2007 with VLT2 and the UVES spectrometer. This data has recently been reanalyzed (Butler et al. 2019), yielding a significant improvement in the Doppler velocity…
I derive analytic scalings for coronagraphic imaging searches for extrasolar planets. I compute the efficiency of detecting planets about any given star, and from this compute dimensionless distribution functions for the detected planets as…
We compare potential state-of-the-art experiments for detecting Earth-mass planets around main-sequence stars using radial velocities, transits, astrometry, and microlensing. For conventionally-discussed signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)…
Most Sun-like and higher-mass stars reside in systems that include one or more gravitationally bound stellar companions. These systems offer an important probe of planet formation in the most common stellar systems, while also providing key…
The recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is expected to produce many new exoplanet discoveries which will be especially amenable to follow-up study. Assessments of the planet discovery yield of TESS, such as…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…
Direct imaging of extra-solar planets is now a reality, especially with the deployment and commissioning of the first generation of specialized ground-based instruments such as the Gemini Planet Imager and SPHERE. These systems will allow…
Future observations of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres will occur for planets at different stages of geological evolution. We expect to observe a wide variety of atmospheres and planets with alternative evolutionary paths, with some…
Exoplanet transit events are attractive targets for the ultrahigh-resolution capabilities afforded by optical interferometers. The intersection of two developments in astronomy enable direct imaging of exoplanet transits: first,…
Over the past 30 years, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, revealing detailed demographics of planets outside the Solar System. One of the most dramatic features of the planet radius distribution is the radius gap, a lack of…