Related papers: Diffraction Analysis of 2-D Pupil Mapping for High…
Directly imaging exoplanets is challenging because quasi-static phase aberrations in the pupil plane (speckles) can mimic the signal of a companion at small angular separations. Kernel phase, which is a generalization of closure phase…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a challenging task as it requires to reach a high contrast at very close separation to the star. Today, the main limitation in the high-contrast images is the quasi-static speckles that are created by…
The high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging earth-like exoplanet at the visible needs a contrast of 10^(-10) at a small angular separation of 4 lambda/D or less. Here we report our recent laboratory experiment that is close to the…
In some super-resolution techniques, adjacent points are illuminated at different times. Thereby, their locations and light intensities can be detected even if the images are very blurred due to diffraction. According to conventional…
Filled arrays of bolometers are currently being employed for use in astronomy from the far-infrared through millimeter parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because of the large range of wavelengths for which such detectors are applicable,…
A key challenge for starshades is formation flying. To successfully image exoplanets, the telescope boresight and starshade must be aligned to ~1 m at separations of tens of thousands of kilometers. This challenge has two parts: first, the…
A high contrast coronagraph is expected to provide one of the promising ways to directly observe extra-solar planets. We present the newest results of our laboratory experiment investigating "rigid" coronagraph with a binary shaped…
Wide field interferometry has become a subject of increasing interest in the recent years. New methods have been suggested in order to avoid the drawbacks of the standard wide-field method (homothetic mapping) which is not applicable when…
Orientation mapping is a widely used technique for revealing the microstructure of a polycrystalline sample. The crystalline orientation at each point in the sample is determined by analysis of the diffraction pattern, a process known as…
Doppler Imaging produces 2D global maps of rotating objects using high-dispersion spectroscopy. When applied to brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets, this technique can constrain global atmospheric dynamics and/or magnetic effects on these…
Direct imaging of exoplanets or circumstellar disk material requires extreme contrast at the 10-6 to 10-12 levels at < 100 mas angular separation from the star. Focal-plane mask (FPM) coronagraphic imaging has played a key role in this…
Extragalactic astronomy relies on the accurate estimation of source photometry corrected for Milky Way dust extinction. This has motivated the creation of a number of "Galactic" dust maps. We investigate whether these maps are contaminated…
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…
Coronagraphs of the apodized pupil and shaped pupil varieties use the Fraunhofer diffraction properties of amplitude masks to create regions of high contrast in the vicinity of a target star. Here we present a hybrid coronagraph…
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…
We present a novel method to determine eccentricity constraints of extrasolar planets in systems with multiple transiting planets through photometry alone. Our method is highly model independent, making no assumptions about the stellar…
Telescope pupil fragmentation from spiders generates specific aberrations observed at various telescopes and expected on the large telescopes under construction. This so-called island effect induces differential pistons, tips and tilts on…
Ill-posed inverse problems are fundamental in many domains, ranging from astrophysics to medical imaging. Emerging diffusion models provide a powerful prior for solving these problems. Existing maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) or posterior…
Quasi-static speckles are a current limitation to faint companion imaging of bright stars. Here we show through simulation and theory that an adaptive pupil mask can be used to reduce these speckles and increase the visibility of faint…
Finding potential life harboring exo-Earths is one of the aims of exoplanetary science. Detecting signatures of life in exoplanets will likely first be accomplished by determining the bulk composition of the planetary atmosphere via…