Related papers: ${\tt PlanetEvidence}$: Planet or Noise?
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…
Future space telescopes may be able to directly image $\sim$10 - 100 planets with sizes and orbits consistent with habitable surface conditions ("exo-Earth candidates" or EECs), but observers will face difficulty in distinguishing these…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a challenging task as it requires to reach a high contrast at very close separation to the star. Today, the main limitation in the high-contrast images is the quasi-static speckles that are created by…
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…
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…
Exoplanet detection by direct imaging is a difficult task: the faint signals from the objects of interest are buried under a spatially structured nuisance component induced by the host star. The exoplanet signals can only be identified when…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a challenging task due to the small angular distance and high contrast relative to their host star, and the presence of quasi-static noise. We propose a new statistical method for direct imaging of exoplanets…
The detection of exoplanets with the radial velocity method consists in detecting variations of the stellar velocity caused by an unseen sub-stellar companion. Instrumental errors, irregular time sampling, and different noise sources…
The treatment of systematic noise is a significant aspect of transit exoplanet data processing due to the signal strength of systematic noise relative to a transit signal. Typically the standard approach to transit detection is to estimate…
Over the past decade, hundreds of nights have been spent on the worlds largest telescopes to search for and directly detect new exoplanets using high-contrast imaging (HCI). Thereby, two scientific goals are of central interest: First, to…
The detection of exoplanets in high-contrast imaging (HCI) data hinges on post-processing methods to remove spurious light from the host star. So far, existing methods for this task hardly utilize any of the available domain knowledge about…
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…
Ideal spatial demultiplexing (SPADE) is proven to be a quantum-optimal tool for exoplanet detection, i.e., asymmetric source discrimination. However, recent investigations into the related problems of separation estimation and symmetric…
The search for exoplanets is an active field in astronomy, with direct imaging as one of the most challenging methods due to faint exoplanet signals buried within stronger residual starlight. Successful detection requires advanced image…
Detecting the faint emission of a secondary source in the proximity of the much brighter source has been the most severe obstacle for using direct imaging in searching for exoplanets. Using quantum state discrimination and quantum imaging…
The detection of small exoplanets with the radial velocity (RV) technique is limited by various poorly known noise sources of instrumental and stellar origin. As a consequence, current detection techniques often fail to provide reliable…
We consider several detection situations where, under the alternative hypothesis, the signal admits a low complexity model and, under both the null and the alternative hypotheses, the distribution of the background noise is {unknown}. We…
A large fraction of the smallest transiting planet candidates discovered by the Kepler and CoRoT space missions cannot be confirmed by a dynamical measurement of the mass using currently available observing facilities. To establish their…
A noise-based non-parametric technique for detecting nebulous objects, for example, irregular or clumpy galaxies, and their structure in noise is introduced. "Noise-based" and "non-parametric" imply that this technique imposes negligible…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…