Related papers: Starshade Exoplanet Data Challenge
By the 2040s, the exoplanet field will have moved from the discovery of a few thousand planets to hundreds of thousands, thanks to Gaia DR5, TESS, PLATO, Roman, and their successors. At that stage, the key bottleneck will no longer be…
Counting pairs of galaxies or stars according to their distance is at the core of real-space correlation analyzes performed in astrophysics and cosmology. Upcoming galaxy surveys (LSST, Euclid) will measure properties of billions of…
The spectrum of an exoplanet reveals the physical, chemical, and biological processes that have shaped its history and govern its future. However, observations of exoplanet spectra are complicated by the overwhelming glare of their host…
The investigation of the atmospheres of closely separated, directly imaged gas giant exoplanets is challenging due to the presence of stellar speckles that pollute their spectrum. To remedy this, the analysis of medium- to high-resolution…
Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets within habitable zones is challenging because faint signals can be obscured by exozodiacal dust, analogous to our solar system's zodiacal dust. This dust scatters starlight, creating a bright…
The search for atmospheric biosignatures in Earth-like exoplanets is one of the most pressing challenges in observational astrobiology. Detecting biogenic gases in terrestrial planets requires high-resolution observations and long…
In the past decade the study of exoplanet atmospheres at high-spectral resolution, via transmission/emission spectroscopy and cross-correlation techniques for atomic/molecular mapping, has become a powerful and consolidated methodology. The…
A quick look at research and development in astronomy shows that we live in exciting times. Exoplanetary systems, supernovae, and merging binary black holes were far out of reach for observers two decades ago and now such phenomena are…
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
In the coming decade, astronomical surveys of the sky will generate tens of terabytes of images and detect hundreds of millions of sources every night. The study of these sources will involve computation challenges such as anomaly detection…
Exoplanet science is one of the most thriving fields of modern astrophysics. A major goal is the atmospheric characterization of dozens of small, terrestrial exoplanets in order to search for signatures in their atmospheres that indicate…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is usually limited by quasi-static speckles. These uncorrected aberrations in a star's point spread function (PSF) obscure faint companions and limit the sensitivity of high-contrast imaging instruments. Most…
Chance-aligned sources or blended companions can cause false positives in planetary transit detections or simply bias the determination of the candidate properties. In the era of high-precision space-based photometers, the need for…
The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project aimed at studying the atmospheres of exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars outside our Solar System. Pandora will provide the first dataset of simultaneous, multiband (visible and NIR),…
Imaging faint companions (exoplanets and brown dwarfs) around nearby stars is currently limited by speckle noise. To efficiently attenuate this noise, a technique called simultaneous spectral differential imaging (SSDI) can be used. This…
FINESSE, a NASA MIDEX mission in Step 2, would conduct a large, uniform survey of exoplanet atmospheres and create a statistically significant sample for comparative planetology. FINESSE's technical capabilities, driven by a scientific…
Due to the efforts by numerous ground-based surveys and NASA's Kepler and TESS, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of transiting exoplanets ideal for atmospheric characterization via spectroscopy with large platforms such as JWST and…
Searching for nearby exoplanets with direct imaging is one of the major scientific drivers for both space and ground-based programs. While the second generation of dedicated high-contrast instruments on 8-m class telescopes is about to…
As observational datasets become larger and more complex, so too are the questions being asked of these data. Data simulations, i.e., synthetic data with properties (pixelization, noise, PSF, artifacts, etc.) akin to real data, are…
Exoplanetary science is on the verge of an unprecedented revolution. The thousands of exoplanets discovered over the past decade have most recently been supplemented by discoveries of potentially habitable planets around nearby low-mass…