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Ground-based telescopes coupled with adaptive optics (AO) have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the…
Context: With no conclusive detection to date, the search for exomoons, satellites of planets orbiting other stars, remains a formidable challenge. Detecting these objects, compiling a population-level sample and constraining their…
We report on the status of the Tierras Observatory, a refurbished 1.3-m ultra-precise fully-automated photometer located at the F. L. Whipple Observatory atop Mt. Hopkins, Arizona. Tierras is designed to limit systematic errors, notably…
Several on-going and future experiments use a Stokes polarimeter (i.e. a rotating wave plate followed by a steady polarizer and by an unpolarized detector) to measure the small polarized component of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The…
The Planck High Frequency Instrument (HFI) is designed to measure the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background and galactic foregrounds in six wide bands centered at 100, 143, 217, 353, 545 and 857 GHz at…
Context. Homochirality is a generic and unique property of life on Earth and is considered a universal and agnostic biosignature. Homochirality induces fractional circular polarization in the incident light that it reflects. Because this…
Accurate measurement of polarization in spectral lines is important for the reliable inference of magnetic fields on the Sun. For ground based observations, polarimetric precision is severely limited by the presence of Earth's atmosphere.…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
We present a calibrated database of reflectance spectra for the solar system planets (i.e., Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and for Titan, spanning from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. We considered data…
Spectroastrometry, which measures wavelength-dependent shifts in the center of light, is well-suited for studying objects whose morphology changes with wavelength at very high angular resolutions. Photonic lantern (PL)-fed spectrometers…
We investigate the possiblity to detect Earth-like planets, in the visible and the near infrared domains, with ground based Extremely Large Telescopes equipped with adaptive systems capable of providing high Strehl ratios. From a detailed…
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…
The direct observation of extrasolar planets and their spectra is coming into reach with the new generation of ground-based near-IR interferometers, like the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). The high contrast between star and…
The detection of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, and their spectroscopic characterization in a search for biosignatures, requires starlight suppression that exceeds the current best ground-based performance by…
We point out some advantages of making observations of extrasolar planets in linearly polarized (LP) light. Older cool stars have quite low levels (~ 10^-4 to 10^-5) of fractional LP, while extrasolar planets can have relatively high…
The PLATO space mission is designed to detect telluric planets in the habitable zone of solar type stars, and simultaneously characterise the host star using ultra high precision photometry. The photometry will be performed on board using…
An important future goal in exoplanetology is to detect and characterize potentially habitable planets. Using nulling interferometry, LIFE will allow us to constrain the radius and effective temperature of (terrestrial) exoplanets, as well…
The discovery of the exoplanet Proxima b highlights the potential for the coming generation of giant segmented mirror telescopes (GSMTs) to characterize terrestrial --- potentially habitable --- planets orbiting nearby stars with direct…
This paper describes the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager on the Solar Orbiter mission (SO/PHI), the first magnetograph and helioseismology instrument to observe the Sun from outside the Sun-Earth line. It is the key instrument meant to…
Instrumental projects that will improve the direct optical finding and characterisation of exoplanets have advanced sufficiently to trigger organized investigation and development of corresponding signal processing algorithms. The first…