Related papers: Segment-level thermal sensitivity analysis for exo…
Current and future high contrast imaging instruments aim to detect exoplanets at closer orbital separations, lower masses, and/or older ages than their predecessors. However, continually evolving speckles in the coronagraphic science image…
The direct observation of cold and temperate planets within 1 to 10 AU would be extremely valuable for uncovering their atmospheric compositions but remains a formidable challenge with current astronomical methods. Ground-based optical…
This chapter reviews various methods of detecting planetary companions to stars from an observational perspective, focusing on radial velocities, astrometry, direct imaging, transits, and gravitational microlensing. For each method, this…
The Transit Ephemeris Refinement and Monitoring Survey (TERMS) conducts radial velocity and photometric monitoring of known exoplanets in order to refine planetary orbits and predictions of possible transit times. This effort is primarily…
The advent of high-contrast imaging instruments combined with medium-resolution spectrographs allows spectral and temporal dimensions to be combined with spatial dimensions to detect and potentially characterize exoplanets with higher…
Exoplanet direct imaging using adaptive optics (AO) is often limited by non-common path aberrations (NCPAs) and aberrations that are invisible to traditional pupil-plane wavefront sensors (WFSs). This can be remedied by focal-plane (FP)…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a near-infrared instrument that uses Adaptive Optics (AO), a coronagraph, and advanced data processing techniques to achieve very high contrast images of exoplanets. The GPI Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) is a…
One of the top remaining science challenges in astronomical optics is the direct imaging and characterization of extrasolar planets and planetary systems. Directly imaging exoplanets from ground-based observatories requires combining…
Exoplanet emission spectra are often modelled assuming that the hemisphere observed is well represented by a horizontally homogenised atmosphere. However this approximation will likely fail for planets with a large temperature contrast in…
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…
Measuring the orbits of directly-imaged exoplanets requires precise astrometry at the milliarcsec level over long periods of time due to their wide separation to the stars ($\gtrsim$10 au) and long orbital period ($\gtrsim$20 yr). To reach…
Our ability to observe, detect, and characterize exoplanetary atmospheres has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, aided largely by developments in astronomical instrumentation; improvements in data analysis techniques; and an…
Detecting and characterising exoplanet atmospheres remains challenging because atmospheric signals can be comparable to residual noise and instrumental/astrophysical systematics. Spectral features span from a few ppm for small planets up to…
Direct imaging instruments have the spatial resolution to resolve exoplanets from their host star. This enables direct characterization of the exoplanets atmosphere, but most direct imaging instruments do not have spectrographs with high…
Wavefront stabilization is a fundamental challenge to high contrast imaging of exoplanets. For both space and ground observations, wavefront control performance is ultimately limited by the finite amount of starlight available for sensing,…
The next generation ground-based extremely large telescopes (ELTs) present incredible opportunities to discover and characterize diverse planetary systems, even potentially habitable worlds. Adaptive-optics assisted thermal-IR (3-14 micron)…
The direct imaging of an Earth-like exoplanet will require sub-nanometric wavefront control across large light-collecting apertures, to reject host starlight and detect the faint planetary signal. Current adaptive optics (AO) systems, which…
We propose a new data analysis method for obtaining transmission spectra of exoplanet atmospheres and brightness variation across the stellar disk from transit observations. The new method is capable of recovering exoplanet atmosphere…
One of the key science goals for extremely large telescopes (ELTs) is the detailed characterization of already known directly imaged exoplanets. The typical adaptive optics (AO) Nyquist control region for ELTs is ~0.4 arcseconds, placing…
Several concepts now exist for small, space-based missions to directly characterize exoplanets in reflected light. Here, we develop an instrument noise model suitable for studying the spectral characterization potential of a…