Related papers: Vortex fiber nulling for exoplanet observations: c…
The 'holy grail' of exoplanet research today is the detection of an earth-like planet: a rocky planet in the habitable zone around a main-sequence star. Extremely precise Doppler spectroscopy is an indispensable tool to find and…
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…
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…
Extragalactic planetary nebulae (PNe) are detectable through relatively strong nebulous [OIII] emission and act as direct probes into the local stellar population. Because they have an apparently universal invariant magnitude cut-off, PNe…
The Near-UV-eXplorer (NUX) is a proposed ground-based, wide-field telescope array with a field of view of $\sim$70 square degrees, designed to operate over the 300-350 nm wavelength range and to achieve a target sensitivity of 20 mag in 150…
High-dynamic range imaging from space in the visible, aiming in particular at the detection of terrestrial exoplanets, necessitates not only the use of a coronagraph, but also of adaptive optics to correct optical defects in real time.…
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…
We propose a new kind of interferometric array that yields images of high dynamic range and large field. The numerous individual apertures in this array form a pattern related to a Fresnel zone plate. This array can be used for…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
We investigate directly imaging exoplanets around eclipsing binaries, using the eclipse as a natural tool for dimming the binary and thus increasing the planet to star brightness contrast. At eclipse, the binary becomes point-like, making…
The Twinkle space telescope has been designed for the characterisation of exoplanets and Solar System objects. Operating in a low Earth, Sun-synchronous orbit, Twinkle is equipped with a 45 cm telescope and visible (0.4 - 1um) and infrared…
For imaging faint exoplanets and disks, a coronagraph-equipped observatory needs focal plane wavefront correction to recover high contrast. The most efficient correction methods iteratively estimate the stellar electric field and suppress…
Understanding exoplanet formation and finding potentially habitable exoplanets is vital to an enhanced understanding of the universe. The use of nulling interferometry to strongly attenuate the central starlight provides the opportunity to…
We report a method that uses "completeness" to estimate the number of exrasolar planets discovered by an observing program with a direct-imaging instrument. We develop a completeness function for Earth-like planets on "habitable" orbits for…
Despite numerous search campaigns based on a diverse set of observational techniques, exomoons - prospective satellites of extrasolar planets - remain an elusive and hard-to-pin-down class of objects. Yet, the case for intensifying this…
Microlensing can access planet populations that no other method can probe: cold wide-orbit planets beyond the snow line, planets in both the Galactic bulge and disk, and free floating planets (FFPs). The demographics of each population will…
One of the long-term goals of exoplanet science is the atmospheric characterization of dozens of small exoplanets in order to understand their diversity and search for habitable worlds and potential biosignatures. Achieving this goal…
As next-generation imaging instruments and interferometers search for planets closer to their stars, they must contend with increasing orbital motion and longer integration times. These compounding effects make it difficult to detect faint…
The direct detection of exoplanets has been the subject of intensive research in the recent years. Data obtained with future high-contrast imaging instruments optimized for giant planets direct detection are strongly limited by the speckle…
Aims. We present a solution to improve the performance of coronagraphs for the detection of exo-planets. Methods. We simulate numerically several kinds of coronagraphic systems, with the aim of evaluating the gain obtained with an adaptive…