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 …
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 …
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 …
The raw coronagraphic performance of current high-contrast imaging instruments is limited by the presence of a quasi-static speckle (QSS) background, resulting from instrumental Non-Common Path Errors (NCPEs). Rapid development of efficient speckle …
Phase-diversity techniques provide a novel observational method for overcoming the effects of turbulence and instrument-induced aberrations in ground-based astronomy. Two implementations of phase-diversity techniques that differ with regard to noise …