Related papers: RefPlanets: Search for reflected light from extra-…
X-rays are particularly suited to probe the physics of extreme objects. However, despite the enormous improvements of X-ray Astronomy in imaging, spectroscopy and timing, polarimetry remains largely unexplored. We propose the photoelectric…
Planets in highly eccentric orbits form a class of objects not seen within our Solar System. The most extreme case known amongst these objects is the planet orbiting HD~20782, with an orbital period of 597~days and an eccentricity of 0.96.…
Imaging exoplanetary systems is essential to characterizing exoplanetary systems and to studying planet-disk interactions to understand planet formation. Such imaging in the visible and near-infrared is challenging because these objects are…
The Palomar Ultraviolet Laser for the Study of Exoplanets (PULSE) will dramatically expand the science reach of PALM-3000, the facility high-contrast extreme adaptive optics system on the 5-meter Hale Telescope. By using an ultraviolet…
Direct detection of extrasolar planets will require imaging systems capable of unprecedented contrast. Apodized pupils provide an attractive way to achieve such contrast but they are difficult, perhaps impossible, to manufacture to the…
Giant planets orbiting stars other than the Sun are clearly detectable through precise radial-velocity measurements of the orbital reflex motion of the parent star. In the four years since the discovery of the companion to the star 51 Peg,…
Many planet candidates have been detected by radial velocity variations of the primary star; they are planet candidates, because of the unknown orbit inclination. Detection of the wobble in the two other dimensions, to be measured by…
There are growing amount of very high-resolution polarized scattered light images of circumstellar disks. Nascent giant planets planets are surrounded by their own circumplanetary disks which may scatter and polarize both the planetary and…
Optical polarimeters are typically calibrated using measurements of stars with known and stable polarization parameters. However, there is a lack of such stars available across the sky. Many of the currently available standards are not…
The characterization of planetary atmospheres is a daunting task, pushing current observing facilities to their limits. The next generation of high-resolution spectrographs mounted on large telescopes -- such as ESPRESSO@VLT and HIRES@ELT…
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 mechanisms of planet formation are still under debate. We know little about how planets form, even if more than 4000 exoplanets have been detected to date. Recent investigations target the cot of newly born planets: the protoplanetary…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
The next generation of ground- and space-based observatories will enable direct imaging and characterization of cold, mature planets through thermal emission and, for the first time, reflected light detection. Known RV and astrometrically…
(Abridged) We discuss the design considerations of the EXPLORE (EXtra-solar PLanet Occultation REsearch) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m-class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the…
Most current high contrast imaging point spread function (PSF) subtraction algorithms use some form of a least-squares noise minimization to find exoplanets that are, before post-processing, often hidden below the instrumental speckle…
Though efforts to detect them have been made with a variety of methods, no technique can claim a successful, confirmed detection of a moon outside the Solar System yet. Moon detection methods are restricted in capability to detecting moons…
Located within 10 degrees of the North Pole, northern Ellesmere Island offers continuous darkness in the winter months. This capability can greatly enhance the detection efficiency of planetary transit surveys and other time domain…
The observed diversity of exoplanets can possibly be traced back to the planet formation processes. Planet-disk interactions induce sub-structures in the circumstellar disk that can be revealed via scattered light observations. However, a…
The surface characterization of rocky exoplanets via emission spectroscopy represents a frontier of current (JWST) and future (HWO) observational efforts. Here, we implement new features in the open-source retrieval code $\texttt{POSEIDON…