Related papers: Planet Formation Imager: Project Update
Interest in the study of magnetic fields and the properties of interstellar dust, explored through increasingly capable far-IR/submillimeter polarimetry, along with maturing detector technology, have set the stage for a transformative leap…
Transmission and eclipse spectroscopy have been invaluable tools for the characterisation of extrasolar planet atmospheres. While they will continue to provide many new insights and discoveries in the decade(s) to come, these methods are…
The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) Orion project is an experiment within the broader PTF survey, a systematic automated exploration of the sky for optical transients. Taking advantage of the wide field of view available using the PTF…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a dedicated facility for directly imaging and spectroscopically characterizing extrasolar planets. It combines a very high-order adaptive optics system, a diffraction-suppressing coronagraph, and an…
Despite the revolution in our knowledge resulting from the detection of planets around mature stars, we know almost nothing about planets orbiting young stars because rapid rotation and active photospheres preclude detection by radial…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Several physical mechanisms have been proposed to describe the assembly of planets in disks surrounding young stars.…
The last two decades have seen remarkable progress in our long-standing goal of determining the abundance and diversity of worlds in the Galaxy. Understanding of this subject involves tracing the path of interstellar material from dense…
Directly imaged exoplanets in wide orbits challenge current gas giant formation theories. They need to form quickly and acquire enough material before the disk dissipates, which cannot be accommodated by in-situ formation by core accretion.…
The scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) - is the oldest method of optical 3D spectroscopy. It is still in use because of the high spectral resolution it provides over a large field of view. The history of the application of this…
The dispersed fixed-delay interferometer (DFDI) represents a new instrument concept for high-precision radial velocity (RV) surveys for extrasolar planets. A combination of Michelson interferometer and medium-resolution spectrograph, it has…
The new planet finder for the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE), just had its first light in Paranal. A dedicated instrument for the direct detection of planets, SPHERE, is…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a new facility instrument for the Gemini Observatory designed to provide direct detection and characterization of planets and debris disks around stars in the solar neighborhood. In addition to its extreme…
HIRMES is a far-infrared spectrometer that was chosen as the third generation instrument for NASA's SOFIA airborne observatory. HIRMES promises background limited performance in four modes that cover the wavelength range between 25 and 122…
When the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) was conceived and its first science cases defined, exoplanets had not been detected. Later studies, however, showed that optical and near-infrared photometric and…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has been designed for the direct detection and characterization of exoplanets and circumstellar disks. GPI is equipped with a dual channel polarimetry mode designed to take advantage of the inherently…
Hi-5 is the L'-band (3.5-4.0 $\mu$m) high-contrast imager of Asgard, an instrument suite in preparation for the visitor focus of the VLTI. The system is optimized for high-contrast and high-sensitivity imaging within the diffraction limit…
The Planetary Systems Imager (PSI) is a proposed instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) that provides an extreme adaptive optics (AO) correction to a multi-wavelength instrument suite optimized for high contrast science. PSI's…
The Stellar Imager (SI) is a UV-Optical, Space-Based Interferometer designed to enable 0.1 milli-arcsecond (mas) spectral imaging of stellar surfaces and of the Universe in general and asteroseismic imaging of stellar interiors. SI is…
During the past decade, state-of-the-art planet-finder instruments like SPHERE@VLT, coupling coronagraphic devices and extreme adaptive optics systems, unveiled, thanks to large surveys, around 20 planetary mass companions at semi-major…
We present the scientific motivation and conceptual design for the recently funded Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), a stabilized fiber-fed near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph for the 10 meter class Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) that will be…