Related papers: Point Process Algorithm: A New Bayesian Approach f…
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 mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star and the…
We present the scientific performance results of PynPoint, our Python-based software package that uses principle component analysis to detect and estimate the flux of exoplanets in two dimensional imaging data. Recent advances in adaptive…
The planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique has the potential to efficiently detect and characterize the thermal spectra of both transiting and non-transiting exoplanets. However, the technique has not been evaluated on multiplanet…
A mid-infrared nulling-space interferometer is a promising way to characterize thermal light from habitable planet candidates around Sun-like stars. However, one of the main challenges for achieving this ambitious goal is a high-precision…
The detection of periodic signals from transiting exoplanets is often impeded by extraneous aperiodic photometric variability, either intrinsic to the star or arising from the measurement process. Frequently, these variations are…
During the last few years, considerable effort has been directed towards large-scale (>> $1 Billion US) missions to detect and characterize earth-like planets around nearby stars, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I)…
We present a new matched filter algorithm for direct detection of point sources in the immediate vicinity of bright stars. The stellar Point Spread Function (PSF) is first subtracted using a Karhunen-Lo\'eve Image Processing (KLIP)…
The two Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) missions aim to perform spectroscopy on extrasolar Earths; TPF-C will operate in visible light, and TPF-I will operate in the mid-infrared. Extrasolar Earths are assumed to be roughly 26 magnitude in…
The main goal of the LISA Pathfinder (LPF) mission is to fully characterize the acceleration noise models and to test key technologies for future space-based gravitational-wave observatories similar to the eLISA concept. The data analysis…
We present two new source extraction methods, based on Bayesian model selection and using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The first is a source detection filter, able to simultaneously detect point sources and estimate the image…
Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources.…
The work presented here attempts at answering the question: how do we decide when a given adetection is a planet or just residual noise in exoplanet direct imaging data? To this end we present a method implemented within a Bayesian…
Complex non-linear and dynamic processes lie at the heart of the planet formation process. Through numerical simulation and basic observational constraints, the basics of planet formation are now coming into focus. High resolution imaging…
Observations of exoplanet atmospheres in high resolution have the potential to resolve individual planetary absorption lines, despite the issues associated with ground-based observations. The removal of contaminating stellar and telluric…
By providing sensitive sub-arcsecond images and integral field spectroscopy in the 25 - 400 micron wavelength range, a far-IR interferometer will revolutionize our understanding of planetary system formation, reveal otherwise-undetectable…
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…
The treatment of systematic noise is a significant aspect of transit exoplanet data processing due to the signal strength of systematic noise relative to a transit signal. Typically the standard approach to transit detection is to estimate…
We develop a method for planet detection in transit data, which is based on the Matched Filter technique, combined with the Gaussianization of the noise outliers. The method is based on Fourier transforms and is as fast as the existing…
This paper is the third part of a trilogy dealing with the principles, performance and limitations of what I named "Telescope-Interferometers" (TIs). The basic idea consists in transforming one telescope into a Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing…