Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

On-sky verification of Fast and Furious focal-plane wavefront sensing: Moving forward toward controlling the island effect at Subaru/SCExAO

Context. High-contrast imaging (HCI) observations of exoplanets can be limited by the island effect (IE). The IE occurs when the main wavefront sensor (WFS) cannot measure sharp phase discontinuities across the telescope's secondary mirror support …

Two Directly Imaged, Wide-orbit Giant Planets around the Young, Solar Analog TYC 8998-760-1

Even though tens of directly imaged companions have been discovered in the past decades, the number of directly confirmed multiplanet systems is still small. Dynamical analysis of these systems imposes important constraints on formation mechanisms of …

On-sky verification of Fast and Furious focal-plane wavefront sensing: Moving forward toward controlling the island effect at Subaru/SCExAO

High-contrast imaging (HCI) observations of exoplanets can be limited by the island effect (IE). On the current generation of telescopes, the IE becomes a severe problem when the ground wind speed is below a few meters per second. This is referred to …

Original use of MUSE's laser tomography adaptive optics to directly image young accreting exoplanets

We present recent results obtained with the VLT/MUSE Integral Field Spectrograph fed by the 4LGSF and its laser tomography adaptive optics module GALACSI. While this so-called narrow-field mode of MUSE was not designed to perform directly imaging of …

SPHERE+: Imaging young Jupiters down to the snowline

SPHERE (Beuzit et al,. 2019) has now been in operation at the VLT for more than 5 years, demonstrating a high level of performance. SPHERE has produced outstanding results using a variety of operating modes, primarily in the field of direct imaging …

RefPlanets: Search for reflected light from extrasolar planets with SPHERE/ZIMPOL

Aims: RefPlanets is a guaranteed time observation programme that uses the Zurich IMaging POLarimeter (ZIMPOL) of Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument at the Very Large Telescope to perform a blind search for exoplanets in …

The Young Suns Exoplanet Survey: Detection of a wide-orbit planetary-mass companion to a solar-type Sco-Cen member

The Young Suns Exoplanet Survey consists of a homogeneous sample of 70 young, solar-mass stars located in the Lower Centaurus-Crux subgroup of the Scorpius-Centaurus association with an average age of 15 ensuremath± 3 Myr. We report the detection of …

Polarimetric imaging mode of VLT/SPHERE/IRDIS. I. Description, data reduction, and observing strategy

Context. Polarimetric imaging is one of the most effective techniques for high-contrast imaging and for the characterization of protoplanetary disks, and it has the potential of becoming instrumental in the characterization of exoplanets. The …

Polarimetric imaging mode of VLT/SPHERE/IRDIS. II. Characterization and correction of instrumental polarization effects

Context. Circumstellar disks and self-luminous giant exoplanets or companion brown dwarfs can be characterized through direct- imaging polarimetry at near-infrared wavelengths. SPHERE/IRDIS at the Very Large Telescope has the capabilities to perform …

A snapshot full-Stokes spectropolarimeter for detecting life on Earth

We present the design of a point-and-shoot non-imaging full-Stokes spectropolarimeter dedicated to detecting life on Earth from an orbiting platform like the ISS. We specifically aim to map circular polarization in the spectral features of chorophyll …