相关论文: Terrestrial Planet Finding with a Visible Light Co…
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…
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Direct observation of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is essential to understand how planetary systems were born, how they evolve, and ultimately, to identify biological signatures on these planets. However, the enormous contrast in flux…
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…
Astrometry is a powerful technique to study the populations of extrasolar planets around nearby stars. It gives access to a unique parameter space and is therefore required for obtaining a comprehensive picture of the properties,…
Extra-solar planets can be efficiently detected in gravitational microlensing events of high magnification. High accuracy photometry is required over a short, well-defined time interval only, of order 10-30 hours. Most planets orbiting the…
Experience in exploring our own solar system has shown that direct investigation of planetary bodies using space probes invariably yields scientific knowledge not otherwise obtainable. In the case of exoplanets, such direct investigation…
In the recent years, interferometric arrays of optical telescopes have reached sizes of the order of 100m, but they have yet to produce high-resolution images. The analysis of image formation now shows that such images are obtainable…
High-contrast imaging observations of large angular diameter stars enable complementary science questions to be addressed compared to the baseline goals of proposed missions like the Terrestrial Planet Finder-Coronagraph, New World's…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
Terrestrial planets may be detected using the gravitational microlensing technique. This was demonstrated in the high magnification event MACHO-98-BLG-35. Observing strategies aimed at measuring the abundance of terrestrial planets are…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses down to 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar…
A next generation of space-based observatories aims to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars using reflected light spectroscopy. However, it remains unclear how such direct imaging…
Several concepts now exist for small, space-based missions to directly characterize exoplanets in reflected light. Here, we develop an instrument noise model suitable for studying the spectral characterization potential of a…
Interest among astronomers in the detection of extra-solar planets is accelerating with the growing realization that it may soon be technically feasible. The ongoing renaissance in telescope construction and the anticipated launches of new…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…
Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…
An Earth-like extra-solar planet emits light which is many orders of magnitude fainter than that of the parent star. We propose a method of identifying bio-signature spectral lines in light from known extra-solar planets based on Fourier…