Related papers: Speckle nulling for exoplanet detection with space…
The direct detection and characterization of exoplanets will be a major scientific driver over the next decade, involving the development of very large telescopes and requires high-contrast imaging close to the optical axis. Some complex…
One of the top remaining science challenges in astronomical optics is the direct imaging and characterization of extrasolar planets and planetary systems. Directly imaging exoplanets from ground-based observatories requires combining…
A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
Atmospheric scintillation is one of the largest sources of error in ground-based spectrophotometry, reducing the precision of astrophysical signals extracted from the time-series of bright objects to that of much fainter objects. Relative…
Directly imaging Earth-sized exoplanets with a visible-light coronagraph instrument on a space telescope will require a system that can achieve $\sim10^{-10}$ raw contrast and maintain it for the duration of observations (on the order of…
In long adaptive optics corrected exposures, exoplanet detections are currently limited by speckle noise originating from the telescope and instrument optics, and it is expected that such noise will also limit future high-contrast imaging…
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,…
Direct exoplanet spectroscopy aims to measure the spectrum of an exoplanet while simultaneously minimizing the light collected from its host star. Isolating the planet light from the starlight improves the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) per…
Direct imaging of extra-solar planets is now a reality, especially with the deployment and commissioning of the first generation of specialized ground-based instruments such as the Gemini Planet Imager and SPHERE. These systems will allow…
Using 2 aspheric mirrors, it is possible to apodize a telescope beam without losing light or angular resolution: the output beam is produced by ``remapping'' the entrance beam to produce the desired light intensity distribution in a new…
Spectroscopic studies of planets outside of our own solar system provide some of the most crucial information about their formation, evolution, and atmospheric properties. In ground-based spectroscopy, the process of extracting the planet's…
Circumstellar environments are now routinely observed by dedicated high-contrast imagers on large, ground-based observatories. These facilities combine extreme adaptive optics and coronagraphy to achieve unprecedented sensitivities for…
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…
One of two approaches to implementing NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder is to build a space telescope that utilizes the techniques of coronagraphy and apodization to suppress diffraction and image exo-planets. We present a method for…
Speckle noise is an inherent disturbance in coherent imaging systems such as digital holography, synthetic aperture radar, optical coherence tomography, or ultrasound systems. These systems usually produce only single observation per view…
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a flagship mission concept proposing to characterize earth-like exoplanets at high contrast with a coronagraph instrument. The most in-depth, validated contrast error budgets made to date have been…
Astrometric monitoring of stars provides a promising method for discovery of low-mass planets around nearby Sun-like stars. The astronomical community has proposed several telescopes designed to perform high-precision astrometric…
The vector vortex coronagraph is an instrument designed for direct detection and spectroscopy of exoplanets over a broad spectral range. Our team is working towards demonstrating contrast performance commensurate with imaging temperate,…
Cool Planet Imaging Coronagraph (CPI-C) on Chinese Space Station Survey Telescope (CSST) is proposed to direct image the cool planets around nearby solar-type stars (within 40 pc). The core scientific objective of CPI-C is to conduct…
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…