In this white paper, we recommend the European Space Agency plays a proactive role in developing a global collaborative effort to construct a large high-contrast imaging space telescope, e.g. as currently under study by NASA. Such a mission will be …
Context. The red dwarf star K2-22 is transited every 9.14 h by an object which is best explained by being a disintegrating rocky exoplanet featuring a variable comet-like dust tail. While the dust is thought to dominate the transit light curve, gas …
Newly forming protoplanets are expected to create cavities and substructures in young, gas-rich protoplanetary disks$^1-3$, but they are difficult to detect as they could be confused with disk features affected by advanced image analysis …
Context. Protoplanetary disks are the birth environments of planetary systems. Therefore, the study of young, circumstellar environments is essential in understanding the processes taking place in planet formation and the evolution of planetary …
Context. Kepler observations have revealed a class of short-period exoplanets, of which Kepler-1520 b is the prototype, which have comet-like dust tails thought to be the result of small, rocky planets losing mass. The shape and chromaticity of the …
Aims: To understand planet formation it is necessary to study the birth environment of planetary systems. Resolved imaging of young planet forming disks allows us to study this environment in great detail and find signs of planet-disk interaction and …
Context. The low wind effect (LWE) refers to a characteristic set of quasi-static wavefront aberrations seen consistently by the SPHERE instrument when dome-level wind speeds drop below 3 ms$^-1$. The LWE produces bright low-order speckles in the …
MagAO-X is an entirely new extreme adaptive optics system for the Magellan Clay 6.5 m telescope, funded by the NSF MRI program starting in Sep 2016. The key science goal of MagAO-X is high- contrast imaging of accreting protoplanets at Hensuremathα. …
We present the monochromatic lab verification of the newly developed SCAR coronagraph that combines a phase plate (PP) in the pupil with a microlens-fed single-mode fiber array in the focal plane. The two SCAR designs that have been measured, create …
Young giant exoplanets emit infrared radiation that can be linearly polarized up to several percent. This linear polarization can trace: 1) the presence of atmospheric cloud and haze layers, 2) spatial structure, e.g. cloud bands and rotational …