Related papers: Exoplanets Sciences with Nulling Interferometers a…
Although there exists a large sample of known exoplanets, little spectroscopic data exists that can be used to study their global atmospheric properties. This deficiency can be addressed by performing phase-resolved spectroscopy --…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Direct measurements of the spectra of extrasolar giant planets are the keys to determining their physical and chemical nature. The goal of theory is to provide the tools and context with which such data are understood. It is only by putting…
An important future goal in exoplanetology is to detect and characterize potentially habitable planets. Using nulling interferometry, LIFE will allow us to constrain the radius and effective temperature of (terrestrial) exoplanets, as well…
We have surveyed all conventional methods proposed or conceivable for obtaining resolved images of an Earth-like exoplanet. Generating a 10 x 10 pixel map of a 1 R_E world at 10 pc demands ~0.85 uas angular resolution and photon-collection…
The 'holy grail' of exoplanet research today is the detection of an earth-like planet: a rocky planet in the habitable zone around a main-sequence star. Extremely precise Doppler spectroscopy is an indispensable tool to find and…
Context: The conventional approach to direct imaging has been the use of a single aperture coronagraph with wavefront correction via extreme adaptive optics. Such systems are limited to observing beyond an inner working (IWA) of a few…
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…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…
We present a solution to obtain a high-resolution image of a wide field with the central source removed by destructive interference. The wide-field image is created by aperture synthesis with a rotating sparse array of telescopes in space.…
Exploring exoplanets has transformed our understanding of the universe by revealing many planetary systems that defy our current understanding. To study their atmospheres, spectroscopic observations are used to infer essential atmospheric…
To date, the ability for observers to reveal the composition or thermal structure of an exoplanet's atmosphere has rested on two techniques: high-contrast direct imaging and time-series observations of transiting exoplanets. The former is…
Exoplanet observations promise one day to unveil the presence of extraterrestrial life. Atmospheric compounds in strong chemical disequilibrium would point to large-scale biological activity just as oxygen and methane do in the Earth's…
Much of the focus of exoplanet atmosphere analysis in the coming decade will be atinfrared wavelengths, with the planned launches of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). However,…
Magnetic fields play a crucial role in planetary evolution and habitability. While the intrinsic magnetic fields of solar system planets are relatively well understood, the magnetic properties of exoplanets remain largely unconstrained,…
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:…
Directly imaging exoplanets is a formidable challenge due to extreme contrast ratios and quasi-static speckle noise, motivating the exploration of advanced post-processing methods. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown…
Spectroscopic observations are extremely important for determining the composition, structure, and surface gravity of exoplanetary atmospheres. High resolution spectroscopy of the planet itself has only been demonstrated a handful of times.…
SCALES (Slicer Combined with Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy) is a 2 - 5 micron high-contrast lenslet-based integral field spectrograph (IFS) designed to characterize exoplanets and their atmospheres. The SCALES…