Related papers: The Planetary Systems Imager: 2-5 Micron Channel
Over the past decade, exoplanet atmospheric characterization has became what some might call the cosmology of astronomy. In an attempt to extract and understand the weak planetary signals (a few percent down to a few tens of ppm times that…
Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a high-contrast imaging instrument designed to directly image and characterize exoplanets. GPI is currently undergoing several upgrades to improve performance. In this paper, we discuss the upgrades to the…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will observe $\sim$150~million stars brighter than $T_{\rm mag} \approx 16$, with photometric precision from 60~ppm to 3~percent, enabling an array of exoplanet and stellar astrophysics…
We propose a new concept for spectral characterization of transiting exoplanets with future space-based telescopes. This concept, called as densified pupil spectroscopy, allows us to perform high, stable spectrophotometry against telescope…
In our solar system massive outer planets dominate in terms of both mass and angular momentum, but few such planets are among the more than 4000 currently confirmed exoplanets, and none of these have accurately determined densities. Here I…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…
Preliminary results of a project aiming at unveiling the nature of the extremely red galaxies (ERGs) (objects with colours R-K>6 and I-K>5) found in deep optical-NIR surveys are presented. Very little is known about these objects, the…
Exoplanetary science is among the fastest evolving fields of today's astronomical research. Ground-based planet-hunting surveys alongside dedicated space missions (Kepler, CoRoT) are delivering an ever-increasing number of exoplanets, now…
[Abridged] Recently, there have been a series of detections of molecules in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high spectral resolution (R~100,000) observations, mostly using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle…
Within ten years, the era of large-scale systematics surveys will decay thanks to a complete census of exoplanetary systems within 200 pc from the Sun. With the first Lights foreseen between 2024 and 2028, the new generation of extremely…
A next-generation instrument named, Slicer Combined with Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy (SCALES), is being planned for the W. M. Keck Observatory. SCALES will have an integral field spectrograph (IFS) and a diffraction-limited…
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…
Transmission spectroscopy is an important technique to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets. With the advent of TESS and, in the future, of PLATO, more and more transiting planets around bright stars will be found and the observing time at…
We discuss the preliminary results of a survey of young (<300 Myr), close (<50 pc) stars with the Simultaneous Differential Extrasolar Planet Imager (SDI) implemented at the VLT and the MMT. SDI uses a double Wollaston prism and a quad…
In the last two decades, thousands of extrasolar planets were discovered based on different observational techniques, and their number must increase substantially in virtue of the ongoing and near-future approved missions and facilities. It…
I present a review of astrometric techniques and instrumentation utilized to search for, detect, and characterize extra-solar planets. First, I briefly summarize the properties of the present-day sample of extrasolar planets, in connection…
The detection of artificial satellite thermal emission at millimeter wavelengths is presented using data from the 3rd-Generation receiver on the South Pole Telescope (SPT-3G). This represents the first reported detection of thermal emission…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, $a$ greater than $\sim 1.5 R_E$. Planets in…