Related papers: The Planetary Systems Imager: 2-5 Micron Channel

We present the 3.5m SPICA space telescope, a proposed Japanese-led JAXA-ESA mission scheduled for launch around 2017. The actively cooled (<5 K), single aperture telescope and monolithic mirror will operate from ~3.5 to ~210 um and will…

In this white paper, we propose an upgrade to the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) consisting of the addition of a new 8m Unit Telescope (UT5). The primary goal of this upgrade is to optimise the VLTI for exoplanet detection by…

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a complex optical system designed to directly detect the self-emission of young planets within two arcseconds of their host stars. After suppressing the starlight with an advanced AO system and apodized…

The analysis of exoplanetary atmospheres by means of high-resolution spectroscopy is an expanding research field which provides information on chemical composition, thermal structure, atmospheric dynamics and orbital velocity of exoplanets.…

Current post-processing techniques in high contrast imaging depend on some source of diversity between the exoplanet signal and the residual star light at that location. The two main techniques are angular differential imaging (ADI), which…

An Earth-like extra-solar planet emits light which is many orders of magnitude fainter than that of the parent star. We propose a method of identifying bio-signature spectral lines in light from known extra-solar planets based on Fourier…

Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) combines extreme adaptive optics, an integral field spectrograph, and a high performance coronagraph to directly image extrasolar planets in the near-infrared. Because the coronagraph blocks most of the light…

A class of extrasolar giant planets - the so-called `hot Jupiters' - orbit within 0.05 AU of their primary stars. These planets should be hot and so emit detectable infrared radiation. The planet HD 209458b is an ideal candidate for the…

In this paper, we investigate the detectability of radio emission from exoplanets, especially hot Jupiters, which are magnified by gravitational microlensing. Because hot Jupiters have orbital periods much shorter than the characteristic…

We are still in the early days of exoplanet discovery. Astronomers are beginning to model the atmospheres and interiors of exoplanets and have developed a deeper understanding of processes of planet formation and evolution. However, we have…

The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…

The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…

In this paper, we review the various ways in which an infrared stellar interferometer can be used to perform direct detection of extrasolar planetary systems. We first review the techniques based on classical stellar interferometry, where…

Exoplanetary science is a very active field of astronomy nowadays, with questions still opened such as how planetary systems form and evolve (occurrence, process), why such a diversity of exoplanets is observed (mass, radius, orbital…

The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) Project is dedicated to defining a next-generation facility that can answer fundamental questions about how planets form, including detection of young giant exoplanets and their circumplanetary disks. The…

Ground-based photometric surveys have led to the discovery of six transiting exoplanets, five of which were detected by the OGLE survey. The FLAMES multi-object spectrograph on the VLT has permitted a very efficient follow-up of the OGLE…

The majority of exoplanets found to date have been discovered via the transit method, and transmission spectroscopy represents the primary method of studying these distant worlds. Currently, in-depth atmospheric characterization of…

Uninterrupted observations from space-borne telescopes provide the photometric precision that is required to detect shallow transits of small planets missed by ground-based surveys. We used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey…

Searching for nearby exoplanets with direct imaging is one of the major scientific drivers for both space and ground-based programs. While the second generation of dedicated high-contrast instruments on 8-m class telescopes is about to…