Related papers: Fast-Cadence High-Contrast Imaging with Informatio…
High-contrast adaptive optics imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past…
The past five years has seen a surge in research and innovative ideas for the imaging of extrasolar planets, particular terrestrial ones. We expect that within the next decade a space observatory will be launched with the objective of…
Fast moving celestial objects are characterized by velocities across the celestial sphere that significantly differ from the motions of background stars. In observational images, these objects exhibit distinct shapes, contrasting with the…
Direct detection, also known as direct imaging, is a method for discovering and characterizing the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations. It is the only means of obtaining spectra of non-transiting exoplanets.…
High quality, repeatable point-spread functions are important for science cases like direct exoplanet imaging, high-precision astrometry, and high-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanets. For such demanding applications, the initial on-sky…
We present a method to estimate distances to stars with spectroscopically derived stellar parameters. The technique is a Bayesian approach with likelihood estimated via comparison of measured parameters to a grid of stellar isochrones, and…
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,…
To image faint substellar companions obscured by the stellar halo and speckles, scattered light from the bright primary star must be removed in hardware or software. We apply the "locally-optimized combination of images" (LOCI) algorithm to…
The unparalleled theoretical performance of an ideal vector vortex coronagraph makes it one of the most promising technologies for directly imaging exoplanets with a future, off-axis space telescope. However, the image contrast required for…
High contrast imaging (HCI) systems rely on active wavefront control (WFC) to deliver deep raw contrast in the focal plane, and on calibration techniques to further enhance contrast by identifying planet light within the residual speckle…
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
High-contrast imaging provided by a coronagraph is critical for the direction imaging of the Earth-like planet orbiting its bright parent star. A major limitation for such direct imaging is the speckle noise that is induced from the…
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…
The stray light uniformity is one of the important factors affecting the signal-to-noise ratio of the optical astronomical telescope. It will cause regional differences in the background intensity of the detector image, resulting in a…
While high-resolution cross-correlation spectroscopy (HRCCS) techniques have proven effective at characterizing the atmospheres of transiting and non-transiting hot Jupiters, the limitations of these techniques are not well understood. We…
Compared to bright star searches, surveys for transiting planets against fainter (V=12-18) stars have the advantage of much higher sky densities of dwarf star primaries, which afford easier detection of small transiting bodies. Furthermore,…
We propose a method to distinguish between cloudy, hazy and clearsky (free of clouds and hazes) exoplanet atmospheres that could be applicable to upcoming large aperture space and ground-based telescopes such as the James Webb Space…
The number of publications of aperture-synthesis images based on optical long-baseline interferometry measurements has recently increased due to easier access to visible and infrared interferometers. The interferometry technique has now…
With increasingly large data sets, weak lensing measurements are able to measure cosmological parameters with ever greater precision. However this increased accuracy also places greater demands on the statistical tools used to extract the…
A large wide-field telescope and camera with optical throughput over 200 m^2 deg^2 -- a factor of 50 beyond what we currently have -- would enable the detection of faint moving or bursting optical objects: from Earth threatening asteroids…