Related papers: Terrestrial Planet Finding with a Visible Light Co…
Detecting exoplanets and other faint sources of emitted and reflected light near a bright star requires deeply suppressing the starlight while efficiently transmitting the dim light from its surroundings. This suppression can be carried out…
One of the promising methods to search for life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is to detect life's signatures in their atmospheres. Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres at the modest resolution needed to search for oxygen, carbon dioxide,…
Exoplanetary science is a very active field of astronomy nowadays, with questions still opened such as how planetary systems form and evolve (occurrence, process), why such a diversity of exoplanets is observed (mass, radius, orbital…
Searching for extrasolar planets by direct detection is extremely challenging for current instrumentation. Indirect methods, that measure the effect of a planet on its host star, are much more promising and have indeed led to the discovery…
This report summarizes the current status of efforts to develop the technologies required for coronographic space missions aimed at the detection of terrestrial extrasolar planets.
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…
Imaging the planets that orbit around other stars requires blocking the host star which is usually 8-10 orders of magnitude brighter than the planets. This is achieved with the help of a stellar coronagraph. In the current work, a concept…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
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…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
Many high contrast coronagraph designs have recently been proposed. In this paper, their suitability for direct imaging of extrasolar terrestrial planets is reviewed. We also develop a linear-algebra based model of coronagraphy that can…
The physical characterization of exoplanets will require to take spectra at several orbital positions. For that purpose, a direct imaging capability is necessary. Direct imaging requires an efficient stellar suppression mechanism,…
The Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (TPF-C) mission presented here is an existence proof for a flagship-class internal coronagraph space mission capable of detecting and characterizing Earth-like planets and planetary systems at…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
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 next generation of high-contrast imaging instruments will provide the first unresolved image of an extrasolar planet. While the emitted infrared light from the planet in thermal equilibrium should show almost no phase effect, the…
Direct imaging and spectroscopy is the likely means by which we will someday identify, confirm, and characterize an Earth-like planet around a nearby Sun-like star. This Chapter summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding…
We investigate directly imaging exoplanets around eclipsing binaries, using the eclipse as a natural tool for dimming the binary and thus increasing the planet to star brightness contrast. At eclipse, the binary becomes point-like, making…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
With the ever-growing number of exoplanets detected, the issue of characterization is becoming more and more relevant. Direct imaging is certainly the most efficient but the most challenging tool to probe the atmosphere of exoplanets and…