Related papers: Starshade Exoplanet Data Challenge
Pandora is a SmallSat mission designed to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, and was selected as part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers Program. Transmission spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets provides our best opportunity to identify…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is crucial for advancing our understanding of planetary systems beyond our solar system, but it faces significant challenges due to the high contrast between host stars and their planets. Wavefront aberrations…
Transmission spectra probe the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, but these observations are also subject to signals introduced by magnetic active regions on host stars. Here we outline scientific opportunities in the next decade for…
We review some of the recent developments and challenges posed by the data analysis in modern digital sky surveys, which are representative of the information-rich astronomy in the context of Virtual Observatory. Illustrative examples…
The naming of astronomical objects has represented among the most significant challenges in the record-keeping of the field since the very beginning. Long and unwieldy coordinate names, uninformative and ambiguous internal names, and the…
There is an opportunity to advance both solar system and extrasolar planetary studies that does not require the construction of new telescopes or new missions but better use and access to inter-disciplinary data sets. This approach…
Policy Brief on "Global Data in Astronomy: Challenges and Opportunities", distilled from the corresponding panel that was part of the discussions during S20 Policy Webinar on Astroinformatics for Sustainable Development held on 6-7 July…
Starting in 2008, NASA has provided the exoplanet community an observational program aimed at obtaining the highest resolution imaging available as part of its mission to validate and characterize exoplanets, as well as their stellar…
We explore the capabilities of a starshade mission to directly image multi-star systems. In addition to the diffracted and scattered light for the on-axis star, a multi-star system features additional starlight leakage from the off-axis…
We present the multiple stellar systems observed within the SpHere INfrared survey for Exoplanet (SHINE). SHINE searched for substellar companions to young stars using high contrast imaging. Although stars with known stellar companions…
The precision of photometric and spectroscopic observations has been systematically improved in the last decade, mostly thanks to space-borne photometric missions and ground-based spectrographs dedicated to finding exoplanets. The field of…
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…
We present an algorithm that uses the distribution of photon arrival times to distinguish speckles from incoherent sources, like planets and disks, in high contrast images. Using simulated data, we show that our approach can overcome the…
The search for biosignatures in potentially habitable exoplanets is one of the major astrophysics' drivers for the coming decades, and the prime science goal of the HWO NASA mission, a large UV-Optical-IR space telescope to be launched in…
While astronomers often assume that exoplanets are perfect spheres when analyzing observations, the subset of these distant worlds that are subject to strong tidal forces and/or rapid rotations are expected to be distinctly ellipsoidal or…
The characterization of nearby rocky exoplanets will become feasible with the next generation of telescopes, such as the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the mission concept Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). Using an improved model…
Future direct imaging missions such as HabEx and LUVOIR aim to catalog and characterize Earth-mass analogs around nearby stars. The exoplanet yield of these missions will be dependent on the frequency of Earth-like planets, and potentially…
The field of exoplanet atmospheric characterization has recently made considerable advances with the advent of high-resolution spectroscopy from large ground-based telescopes and the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).…
Direct exoplanet spectroscopy aims to measure the spectrum of an exoplanet while simultaneously minimizing the light collected from its host star. Isolating the planet light from the starlight improves the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) per…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…