Related papers: ${\tt PlanetEvidence}$: Planet or Noise?
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Unexpected structure in images of astronomical sources often presents itself upon visual inspection of the image, but such apparent structure may either correspond to true features in the source or be due to noise in the data. This paper…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars, but these planets are on the very edge of the mission's detection sensitivity. Accurately determining the occurrence rate…
The high contrast and spatial resolution requirements for directly imaging exoplanets requires effective coordination of wavefront control, coronagraphy, observation techniques, and post-processing algorithms. However, even with this suite…
In astronomical imaging, the low photon count of exposures necessitates extensive post-processing steps, including contamination removal and denoising. This paper evaluates deep-learning denoising methods that can be trained without clean…
The capability of the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I) for planetary signal extraction, including both detection and spectral characterization, can be optimized by taking proper account of instrumental characteristics and…
Exoplanets with a long orbital period are difficult to discover by extant methods. Our first publication (Lerner, P., A. Mayer, T. E. Sullivan. 2023. A new method for the discovery of the distant exoplanets. SPIE Proceedings 12680:…
This is a scientific strategy for the detection and characterization of extrasolar planets; that is, planets orbiting other stars. As such, it maps out over a 15-year horizon the techniques and capabilities required to detect and measure…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
The classical picture of our Solar System being the archetypal outcome of planet formation has been rendered obsolete by the astonishing diversity of extrasolar-system architectures. From rare hot-Jupiters to abundant super-Earths and…
We present an analytic theory for the resolution attainable via eclipse mapping of exoplanets, based on the Fourier components of the brightness distribution on the planetary disk. We find that the impact parameter determines which features…
For exoplanet direct detection mission concepts such as Terrestrial Planet Finder or Exoplanet Probe, light from the exozodiacal dust tends to obscure any exoplanets present in the image. Data analysis methods to identify point sources…
Exoplanet imaging is a major challenge in astrophysics due to the need for high angular resolution and high contrast. We present a multi-scale statistical model for the nuisance component corrupting multivariate image series at high…
High-contrast imaging of exoplanets hinges on powerful post-processing methods to denoise the data and separate the signal of a companion from its host star, which is typically orders of magnitude brighter. Existing post-processing…
Sensor noise sources cause differences in the signal recorded across pixels in a single image and across multiple images. This paper presents a Bayesian approach to decomposing and characterizing the sensor noise sources involved in imaging…
The estimation of periodicity is a fundamental task in many scientific areas of study. Existing methods rely on theoretical assumptions that the observation times have equal or i.i.d. spacings, and that common estimators, such as the…
We investigate the possibility of exoplanet detection orbiting source stars in microlensing events through WFIRST observations. We perform a Monto Carlo simulation on the detection rate of exoplanets via microlensing, assuming that each…
The only way to detect planets around stars at distances of several kpc is by (photometric or astrometric) microlensing observations. In this paper, we show that the capability of photometric microlensing extends to the detection of signals…
Gravitational microlensing occurs when a foreground star happens to pass very close to our line of sight to a more distant background star. The foreground star acts as a lens, splitting the light from the source star into two images, which…
The idea of finding extrasolar planets (ESPs) through observations of drops in stellar brightness due to transiting objects has been around for decades. It has only been in the last ten years, however, that any serious attempts to find ESPs…