Related papers: Efficient detection and characterization of exopla…
Current plans call for the first Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, TPF-C, to be a monolithic space telescope with a coronagraph for achieving high contrast. The coronagraph removes the diffracted starlight allowing the nearby planet to be…
The coupling of large telescopes to astronomical instruments has historically been challenging due to the tension between instrument throughput and stability. Light from the telescope can either be injected wholesale into the instrument,…
Direct imaging of extrasolar planets with future space-based coronagraphic telescopes may provide a means of detecting companion moons at wavelengths where the moon outshines the planet. We propose a detection strategy based on the…
Context. Proxima Cen b is the prime target for the search of life around a nearby exoplanet by characterizing its atmosphere in reflected light. Due to the very high star/companion contrast (<1E-6), High Dispersion Coronagraphy is the most…
Direct detection of exoplanets requires high dynamic range imaging. Coronagraphs could be the solution, but their performance in space is limited by wavefront errors (manufacturing errors on optics, temperature variations, etc.), which…
High-contrast imaging from space must overcome two major noise sources to successfully detect a terrestrial planet angularly close to its parent star: photon noise from diffracted star light, and speckle noise from star light scattered by…
We demonstrate a new approach to classical fiber-fed spectroscopy. Our method is to use a photonic lantern that converts an arbitrary (e.g. incoherent) input beam into N diffraction-limited outputs. For the highest throughput, the number of…
The vortex coronagraph is an optical instrument that precisely removes on-axis starlight allowing for high contrast imaging at small angular separation from the star, thereby providing a crucial capability for direct detection and…
Exoplanets are celestial bodies orbiting stars beyond our Solar System. Although historically they posed detection challenges, Kepler's data has revolutionized our understanding. By analyzing flux values from the Kepler Mission, we…
Aims. We present a solution to improve the performance of coronagraphs for the detection of exo-planets. Methods. We simulate numerically several kinds of coronagraphic systems, with the aim of evaluating the gain obtained with an adaptive…
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.…
The next few years will be critical for technology development for Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) in its mission to search for and characterize extrasolar planets. To achieve its stated goals with contrasts of one part in ten billion,…
The optical vortex coronagraph (OVC) is one of the promising ways for direct imaging exoplanets because of its small inner working angle and high throughput. This paper presents the design and laboratory demonstration performance at 633nm…
We present scope (Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation), a Python package to create a forward model of telescope detectors and simulate stellar targets with motion relative to the CCD. The primary application of this…
The direct detection of exoplanets has been the subject of intensive research in the recent years. Data obtained with future high-contrast imaging instruments optimized for giant planets direct detection are strongly limited by the speckle…
Direct imaging of exoplanets relies on complex wavefront sensing and control architectures. In addition to fast adaptive optics systems, most of the future high-contrast imaging instruments will soon be equipped with focal plane wavefront…
Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…
We demonstrate the use of an optimized 5 core photonic lantern (PL) to simultaneously measure tip/tilt errors at the telescope focal plane, while also providing the input to an instrument. By replacing a single mode (SM) fiber with the PL…
A multitude of coronagraphic techniques for the space-based direct detection and characterization of exo-solar terrestrial planets are actively being pursued by the astronomical community. Typical coronagraphs have internal shaped focal…
A next generation of space-based observatories aims to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars using reflected light spectroscopy. However, it remains unclear how such direct imaging…