High-Contrast Imaging: Hide and Seek with Exoplanets

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Claudi, Riccardo, Mesa, Dino
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Claudi, Riccardo
Mesa, Dino
author_facet Claudi, Riccardo
Mesa, Dino
contents So far, most of the about 5700 exoplanets have been discovered mainly with radial velocity and transit methods. These techniques are sensitive to planets in close orbits, not being able to probe large star--planet separations. $μ$-lensing is the indirect method that allows us to probe the planetary systems at the snow-line and beyond, but it is not a repeatable observation. On the contrary, direct imaging (DI) allows for the detection and characterization of low mass companions at wide separation (\mbox{$\leq$ 5--6 au}). The main challenge of DI is that a typical planet--star contrast ranges from $10^{-6}$, for a young Jupiter in emitted light, to $10^{-9}$ for Earth in reflected light. In the last two decades, a lot of efforts have been dedicated to combining large (D $\geq$ 5 m) telescopes (to reduce the impact of diffraction) with coronagraphs and high-order adaptive optics (to correct phase errors induced by atmospheric turbulence), with sophisticated image post-processing, to reach such a contrast between the star and the planet in order to detect and characterize cooler and closer companions to nearby stars. Building on the first pioneering instrumentation, the second generation of high-contrast imagers, SPHERE, GPI, and SCExAO, allowed us to probe hundreds of stars (e.g., 500--600 stars using SHINE and GPIES), contributing to a better understanding of the demography and the occurrence of planetary systems. The DI offers a possible clear vision for studying the formation and physical properties of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs, and the future DI (space and ground-based) instruments with deeper detection limits will enhance this vision. In this paper, we briefly review the methods, the instruments, the main sample of targeted stars, the remarkable results, and the perspective of this rising technique.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_07976
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle High-Contrast Imaging: Hide and Seek with Exoplanets
Claudi, Riccardo
Mesa, Dino
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
So far, most of the about 5700 exoplanets have been discovered mainly with radial velocity and transit methods. These techniques are sensitive to planets in close orbits, not being able to probe large star--planet separations. $μ$-lensing is the indirect method that allows us to probe the planetary systems at the snow-line and beyond, but it is not a repeatable observation. On the contrary, direct imaging (DI) allows for the detection and characterization of low mass companions at wide separation (\mbox{$\leq$ 5--6 au}). The main challenge of DI is that a typical planet--star contrast ranges from $10^{-6}$, for a young Jupiter in emitted light, to $10^{-9}$ for Earth in reflected light. In the last two decades, a lot of efforts have been dedicated to combining large (D $\geq$ 5 m) telescopes (to reduce the impact of diffraction) with coronagraphs and high-order adaptive optics (to correct phase errors induced by atmospheric turbulence), with sophisticated image post-processing, to reach such a contrast between the star and the planet in order to detect and characterize cooler and closer companions to nearby stars. Building on the first pioneering instrumentation, the second generation of high-contrast imagers, SPHERE, GPI, and SCExAO, allowed us to probe hundreds of stars (e.g., 500--600 stars using SHINE and GPIES), contributing to a better understanding of the demography and the occurrence of planetary systems. The DI offers a possible clear vision for studying the formation and physical properties of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs, and the future DI (space and ground-based) instruments with deeper detection limits will enhance this vision. In this paper, we briefly review the methods, the instruments, the main sample of targeted stars, the remarkable results, and the perspective of this rising technique.
title High-Contrast Imaging: Hide and Seek with Exoplanets
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07976