Related papers: Optical Verification Experiments of Sub-scale Star…
High contrast imaging is the primary path to the direct detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around solar-type stars; a cleverly designed internal coronagraph suppresses the light from the star, revealing the elusive…
CONTEXT: High-precision stellar analyses require hydrodynamic modeling to interpret chemical abundances or oscillation modes. Exoplanet atmosphere studies require stellar background spectra to be known along the transit path while detection…
The Breakthrough Starshot project aims to send centimeter-sized, gram-scale "StarChip" probes to Alpha Centauri at a speed of $\sim0.2c$. On the other hand, Zhang \& Li recently proposed that trans-relativistic cameras may be sent to any…
We present here new experimental results on high contrast imaging of 10^{-7} at 4.5Lambda/D (Lambda = 0.820 microns) by combining a circular focal plane mask (coronagraph) of 2.5Lambda/D diameter and a multi-Gaussian pupil plane mask. Both…
Ultralight particles, with a mass below the electronvolt scale, exhibit wave-like behavior and have arisen as a compelling dark matter candidate. A particularly intriguing subclass is scalar dark matter, which induces variations in…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…
We propose to search for biosignatures in the spectra of reflected light from about 100 Earth-sized planets that are already known to be orbiting in their habitable zones (HZ). For a sample of G and K type hosts, most of these planets will…
Today, there exists a wide variety of algorithms dedicated to high-contrast imaging, especially for the detection and characterisation of exoplanet signals. These algorithms are tailored to address the very high contrast between the…
JWST has begun its scientific mission, which includes the atmospheric characterization of transiting exoplanets. Some of the first exoplanets to be observed by JWST have equilibrium temperatures below 1000 K, which is a regime where…
The detection and characterisation of extra-solar planets is a major theme driving modern astronomy, with the vast majority of such measurements being achieved by Doppler radial-velocity and transit observations. Another technique -- direct…
The Planet Hunting and Asteroseismology Explorer Spectrophotometer, PHASES, is a concept for a space-borne instrument to obtain flux calibrated spectra and measure micro-magnitude photometric variations of nearby stars. The science drivers…
We use a newly developed observing mode on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), spatial scanning, to increase source sampling a thousand-fold and measure changes in source positions to a precision of 20--40…
We explore the possibility of detecting very faint, very close-in stellar companions using large aperture ground-based telescopes and the technique of optical speckle imaging. We examine the state of high angular resolution speckle imaging…
We present a unique method that allows the LSST to scan the sky for stellar variability on short timescales. The operational component of the strategy requires LSST to take star trail images. The image processing component uses deep…
Supernova (SN) rates serve as an important probe of star-formation models and initial mass functions. Near-infrared seeing-limited ground-based surveys typically discover a factor of 3-10 fewer SNe than predicted from far-infrared (FIR)…
At optical wavelengths, an exoplanet's signature is essentially reflected light from the host star - several orders of magnitude fainter. Since it is superimposed on the star spectrum its detection has been a difficult observational…
We present an analysis on the detection viability of refraction effects in Kepler's exoplanet atmospheres using binning techniques for their light curves in order to compare against simulated refraction effects. We split the Kepler…
Space-based stellar coronagraph instruments aim to directly image exoplanets that are a fraction of an arcsecond separation and ten billion times fainter than their host star. To achieve this, one or more deformable mirrors (DMs) are used…
We have developed a new method to improve the transit detection of Earth-sized planets in front of solar-like stars by fitting stellar microvariability by means of a spot model. A large Monte Carlo numerical experiment has been designed to…
High-contrast imaging for the detection and characterization of exoplanets relies on the instrument's capability to block out the light of the host star. Some current post-processing methods for calibrating out the residual speckles use…