Related papers: RefPlanets: Search for reflected light from extra-…

We have explored a method for finding giant planets in the outer Solar System by detecting their thermal emission and proper motion between two far-infrared all-sky surveys separated by 23.4 years, taken with the InfraRed Astronomical…

High-resolution Doppler spectroscopy is a powerful tool for identifying molecular species in the atmospheres of both transiting and non-transiting exoplanets. Currently, such data is analysed using cross-correlation techniques to detect the…

Since the first discovery of an extra-solar planet around a main-sequence star, in 1995, the number of detected exoplanets has increased enormously. Over the past two decades, observational instruments (both onboard and on ground-based…

We report the first direct detection of an exoplanet in the visible polarized light. The transiting planet HD189733b is one of the very hot Jupiters with shortest periods and, thus, smallest orbits, which makes them ideal candidates for…

Photometric phase curves provide an important window onto exoplanetary atmospheres and potentially even their surfaces. With similar amplitudes to occultations but far longer baselines, they have a higher sensitivity to planetary photons at…

CONTEXT: Combining high-contrast imaging with high-resolution spectroscopy offers a powerful way to detect and characterize exoplanets around nearby stars, despite challenges linked to their faintness. Instruments like VLT/SPHERE are state…

In Spring 2013, the LEECH (LBTI Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt) survey began its $\sim$130-night campaign from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) atop Mt Graham, Arizona. This survey benefits from the many technological achievements of the…

In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…

We present our search program for substellar companions using high-precision relative astronomy. Due to its orbital motion around the star, an unseen substellar companion would produce a periodic "wobble" of the host star, which is the…

We present the scientific performance results of PynPoint, our Python-based software package that uses principle component analysis to detect and estimate the flux of exoplanets in two dimensional imaging data. Recent advances in adaptive…

[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…

Expanding from previous work we present weak lensing measurements for a total sample of 30 distant ($z_\mathrm{median}=0.93$) massive galaxy clusters from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SPT-SZ) Survey, measuring galaxy shapes…

Clouds and other features in exoplanet and brown dwarf atmospheres cause variations in brightness as they rotate in and out of view. Ground-based instruments reach the high contrasts and small inner working angles needed to monitor these…

We use observations with the infrared-optimized MagAO system and Clio camera in 3.9 $\mu$m light to place stringent mass constraints on possible undetected companions to Sirius A. We suppress the light from Sirius A by imaging it through a…

The Search for Planets Orbiting Two Stars (SPOTS) survey aims to study the formation and distribution of planets in binary systems by detecting and characterizing circumbinary planets and their formation environments through direct imaging.…

The Galactic Plane Infrared Polarization Survey (GPIPS) seeks to characterize the magnetic field in the dusty Galactic disk using near-infrared stellar polarimetry. All GPIPS observations were completed using the 1.83 m Perkins telescope…

In the era of photometry with space-based telescopes, such as CHEOPS (CHaracterizing ExOPlanets Satellite), JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars), and ARIEL (Atmospheric Remote-sensing…

Direct imaging of exoplanets will allow us to directly observe the planet in reflected light. Such a scenario may eventually allow for the possibility to scan the planetary surface for the presence of artificial structures made by alien…

PULSE is a new concept to augment the currently operating 5.1-m Hale PALM-3000 exoplanet adaptive optics system with an ultraviolet Rayleigh laser and associated wavefront sensor. By using an ultraviolet laser to measure the high spatial…

The challenge for optical detection of terrestial planet is the 25 magnitude brightness contrast between the planet and its host star. This paper introduces a new pupil design that produces a very dark null along its symmetry axis. By…