Are we alone? In our quest to find life beyond Earth, we use our own planet to develop and verify new methods and techniques to remotely detect life. Our Life Signature Detection polarimeter (LSDpol), a snapshot full-Stokes spectropolarimeter to be …
Context. Homochirality is a generic and unique property of life on Earth and is considered a universal and agnostic biosignature. Homochirality induces fractional circular polarization in the incident light that it reflects. Because this circularly …
Current and future high-contrast imaging instruments require extreme adaptive optics systems to reach contrasts necessary to directly imaged exoplanets. Telescope vibrations and the temporal error induced by the latency of the control loop limit the …
We report on the design, construction, and commissioning of a prototype aperture masking technology implemented at the Keck OSIRIS Imager: the holographic aperture mask. Holographic aperture masking (HAM) aims at (i) increasing the throughput of …
Over the last decade, the vector-apodizing phase plate (vAPP) coronagraph has been developed from concept to on-sky application in many high-contrast imaging systems on 8-m class telescopes. The vAPP is an geometric-phase patterned coronagraph that …
Context. Young giant planets and brown dwarf companions emit near- infrared radiation that can be linearly polarized up to several percent. This polarization can reveal the presence of an (unresolved) circumsubstellar accretion disk, rotation-induced …
The Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be dedicated to detecting and characterising nearby exoplanets with sizes from sub-Neptune to Earth-size in the neighbourhood of the Sun. This goal is achieved …
LOUPE, the Lunar Observatory for Unresolved Polarimetry of the Earth, is a small, robust spectro-polarimeter for observing the Earth as an exoplanet. Detecting Earth-like planets in stellar habitable zones is one of the key challenges of modern …
Many biologically produced chiral molecules such as amino acids and sugars show a preference for left or right handedness (homochirality). Light reflected by biological materials such as algae and leaves therefore exhibits a small amount of circular …
Focal plane wavefront sensing is an elegant solution for wavefront sensing since near-focal images of any source taken by a detector show distortions in the presence of aberrations. Non- Common Path Aberrations and the Low Wind Effect both have the …