Related papers: Identifying Exo-Earth Candidates in Direct Imaging…
Direct imaging is likely the best way to characterize the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. Previously, Stark et al. (2014, 2015, 2016) estimated the Earth twin yield of future direct imaging…
The past five years has seen a surge in research and innovative ideas for the imaging of extrasolar planets, particular terrestrial ones. We expect that within the next decade a space observatory will be launched with the objective of…
The holy grail of exoplanet searches is an exo-Earth, an Earth mass planet in the habitable zone around a nearby star. Mass is the most important parameter of a planet and can only be measured by observing the motion of the star around the…
Stellar radial velocity (RV) measurements have proven to be a very successful method for detecting extrasolar planets. Analysing RV data to determine the parameters of the extrasolar planets is a significant statistical challenge owing to…
With the ever-growing number of exoplanets detected, the issue of characterization is becoming more and more relevant. Direct imaging is certainly the most efficient but the most challenging tool to probe the atmosphere of exoplanets and…
The physical characterization of exoplanets will require to take spectra at several orbital positions. For that purpose, a direct imaging capability is necessary. Direct imaging requires an efficient stellar suppression mechanism,…
When searching for exoplanets, one wants to count how many planets orbit a given star, and to determine what their characteristics are. If the estimated planet characteristics are too far from those of a planet truly present, this should be…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
Direct imaging and spectroscopy is the likely means by which we will someday identify, confirm, and characterize an Earth-like planet around a nearby Sun-like star. This Chapter summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding…
A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
We examine the scientific viability of an imaging mission to find exo-Earths combining the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with a starshade external occulter under a realistic set of astrophysical assumptions. We define an exo-Earth as a…
We present a novel method for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets from space. This method uses four collecting telescopes, combined with phase chopping and a spectrometer, with observations on only a few baselines rather…
The work presented here attempts at answering the question: how do we decide when a given adetection is a planet or just residual noise in exoplanet direct imaging data? To this end we present a method implemented within a Bayesian…
Rigorously quantifying the information in high contrast imaging data is important for informing follow-up strategies to confirm the substellar nature of a point source, constraining theoretical models of planet-disk interactions, and…
We report new methods for evaluating realistic observing programs that search stars for planets by direct imaging, where observations are selected from an optimized star list, and where stars can be observed multiple times. We show how…
The number of potentially habitable planets continues to increase, but we lack the time and resources to characterize all of them. With $\sim$30 known potentially habitable planets and an ever-growing number of candidate and confirmed…
We propose a direct imaging method for the detection of exoplanets based on a combined low-rank plus structured sparse model. For this task, we develop a dictionary of possible effective circular trajectories a planet can take during the…
Gravitational microlensing provides a unique window on the properties and prevalence of extrasolar planetary systems because of its ability to find low-mass planets at separations of a few AU. The early evidence from microlensing indicates…
We propose a method to detect exoplanets based on their host star's intensity centroid after it passes thru a vortex filter. Based on our calculations with planets in face-on orbits, exoplanets with relative proximity to their host stars…