Related papers: Rounding up the wanderers: optimizing coronagraphi…
This is a scientific strategy for the detection and characterization of extrasolar planets; that is, planets orbiting other stars. As such, it maps out over a 15-year horizon the techniques and capabilities required to detect and measure…
The upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will dramatically increase our understanding of exoplanets, particularly through direct imaging. Microlensing and radial velocity surveys indicate that some M-dwarfs host long…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
Terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars are of great interest and provide a good sample for further characteristics of their habitability. In this paper, we collect a nearby star catalog within 20 pc according to the…
We present the results of realistic end-to-end simulations of observations of nearby stars with the proposed global astrometry mission GAIA, recently recommended within the context of ESA's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific program. We…
The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…
We report the results of a 154 MHz survey to search for emission from exoplanets located in the Upper Scorpius subgroup of the Sco Cen OB2 Association, the closest substantial region of recent star formation. This survey is different from…
Extrasolar planet searches targeting very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are hampered by intrinsic or instrumental limitations. Time series of astrometric measurements with precisions better than one milli-arcsecond can yield new evidence…
We propose a new approach for high-contrast imaging at the diffraction limit using segmented telescopes in a modest observation bandwidth. This concept, named "spectroscopic fourth-order coronagraphy", is based on a fourth-order coronagraph…
We advocate for a large scale imaging survey of nearby young moving groups and star-forming regions to directly detect exoplanets over an unexplored range of masses, ages and orbits. Discovered objects will be identified early enough in…
We analyze photometric observations of stars, which experienced microlensing events at the considered time, in order to compare the efficiency of detecting exoplanets in observations performed at thirteen different telescopes and with…
We analyze three years (1998-2000) of OGLE observations of microlensing events to place limits on the abundance of planets with a planet-to-star mass ratio $q=10^{-3}$ at distances $\sim 1-4$AU from their host stars, i.e. `cool Jupiters'.…
To detect Earth-like planets in the visible with a coronagraphic telescope, two major noise sources have to be overcome: the photon noise of the diffracted star light, and the speckle noise due to the star light scattered by instrumental…
Coronagraph instruments on future space telescopes will enable the direct detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars for the first time. The quest for the optimal optical coronagraph designs has made rapid…
High-contrast adaptive optics imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past…
The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…
We present a procedure for calculating expected exoplanet imaging yields, which explicitly separates the effects of instrument performance from assumptions of planet distributions. This `depth of search' approach allows for fast…
High contrast imaging can find and characterize gas giant planets around nearby young stars and the closest M stars, complementing radial velocity and astrometric searches by exploring orbital separations inaccessible to indirect methods.…
Earth-like extra-solar planets may be detected with 1-2m class telescopes using the gravitational microlensing technique. The essential requirement is the ability to be able to carry out continuous observations of the galactic bulge. A…
Microlensing is one of the most powerful methods that can detect extrasolar planets and a future space-based survey with a high monitoring frequency is proposed to detect a large sample of Earth-mass planets. In this paper, we examine the…