Direct imaging of exoplanets in the habitable zone with adaptive optics

Abstract

One of the primary goals of exoplanet science is to find and characterize habitable planets, and direct imaging will play a key role in this effort. Though imaging a true Earth analog is likely out of reach from the ground, the coming generation of giant telescopes will find and characterize many planets in and near the habitable zones (HZs) of nearby stars. Radial velocity and transit searches indicate that such planets are common, but imaging them will require achieving extreme contrasts at very small angular separations, posing many challenges for adaptive optics (AO) system design. Giant planets in the HZ may even be within reach with the latest generation of high-contrast imagers for a handful of very nearby stars. Here we will review the definition of the HZ, and the characteristics of detectable planets there. We then review some of the ways that direct imaging in the HZ will be different from the typical exoplanet imaging survey today. Finally, we present preliminary results from our observations of the HZ of α Centauri A with the Magellan AO system's VisAO and Clio2 cameras.

arXiv comment13 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Proc. SPIE 9148

References in corpus (33)

• Habitable Zones Around Main-Sequence Stars: New Estimates
• Evolutionary models for cool brown dwarfs and extrasolar giant planets. The case of HD 20945
• Planet Occurrence within 0.25 AU of Solar-type Stars from Kepler
• The false positive rate of Kepler and the occurrence of planets
• Detection and Characterization of Exoplanets and Disks using Projections on Karhunen-Loeve Eigenimages
• The Gemini Planet Imager: First Light
• Habitable Zones Around Main-Sequence Stars: Dependence on Planetary Mass
• The Occurrence Rate of Small Planets around Small Stars
• The Exoplanet Orbit Database
• An Earth-sized Planet in the Habitable Zone of a Cool Star
• Hydrogen Greenhouse Planets Beyond the Habitable Zone
• The HARPS search for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone: I -- Very low-mass planets around HD20794, HD85512 and HD192310
• Planetary detection limits taking into account stellar noise. I. Observational strategies to reduce stellar oscillation and granulation effects
• HD 106906 b: A planetary-mass companion outside a massive debris disk
• The Dependence of Brown Dwarf Radii on Atmospheric Metallicity and Clouds: Theory and Comparison with Observations
• Exoplanet albedo spectra and colors as a function of planet phase, separation, and metallicity
• Towards the Minimum Inner Edge Distance of the Habitable Zone
• Exomoon habitability constrained by illumination and tidal heating
• Discovery of H-alpha Emission from the Close Companion Inside the Gap of Transitional Disk HD142527
• Fundamental limitations on Earth-like planet detection with Extremely Large Telescopes
• The Habitable Zone Gallery
• The Stability of Planets in the Alpha Centauri system
• Terrestrial, Habitable-Zone Exoplanet Frequency from Kepler
• Calculating the Habitable Zone of Binary Star Systems I: S-Type Binaries
• Diffraction-limited Visible Light Images of Orion Trapezium Cluster With the Magellan Adaptive Secondary AO System (MagAO)
• On the Frequency of Jupiter Analogs
• Magellan Adaptive Optics first-light observations of the exoplanet $\beta$ Pic b. I. Direct imaging in the far-red optical with MagAO+VisAO and in the near-IR with NICI
• New Completeness Methods for Estimating Exoplanet Discoveries by Direct Detection
• On High-Contrast Characterization of Nearby, Short-Period Exoplanets with Giant Segmented-Mirror Telescopes
• Mass-Radius Relationships for Very Low Mass Gaseous Planets
• High Resolution H alpha Images of the Binary Low-mass Proplyd LV 1 with the Magellan AO System
• The First Circumstellar Disk Imaged in Silhouette with Adaptive Optics: MagAO Imaging of Orion 218-354
• Direct Imaging in the Habitable Zone and the Problem of Orbital Motion

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Habitability of Proxima Centauri b: II: Environmental States and Observational Discriminants
• Enhancing stellar spectroscopy with extreme adaptive optics and photonics
• Millisecond Exoplanet Imaging, I: Method and Simulation Results
• Improved companion mass limits for Sirius A with thermal infrared coronagraphy using a vector-apodizing phase plate and time-domain starlight-subtraction techniques
• High contrast imaging with Fizeau interferometry: The case of Altair