High-contrast imaging of tight resolved binaries with two vector vortex coronagraphs in cascade with the Palomar SDC instrument
arXiv:1808.00585
Abstract
More than half of the stars in the solar neighborhood reside in binary/multiple stellar systems, and recent studies suggest that gas giant planets may be more abundant around binaries than single stars. Yet, these multiple systems are usually overlooked or discarded in most direct imaging surveys, as they prove difficult to image at high-contrast using coronographs. This is particularly the case for compact binaries (less than 1" angular separation) with similar stellar magnitudes, where no existing coronagraph can provide high-contrast regime. Here we present preliminary results of an on-going Palomar pilot survey searching for low-mass companions around ~15 young challenging binary systems, with angular separation as close as 0".3 and near-equal K-band magnitudes. We use the Stellar Double Coronagraph (SDC) instrument on the 200-inch Telescope in a modified optical configuration, making it possible to align any targeted binary system behind two vector vortex coronagraphs in cascade. This approach is uniquely possible at Palomar, thanks to the absence of sky rotation combined with the availability of an extreme AO system, and the number of intermediate focal-planes provided by the SDC instrument. Finally, we expose our current data reduction strategy, and we attempt to quantify the exact contrast gain parameter space of our approach, based on our latest observing runs.
arXiv comment12 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the SPIE, paper 10702-147
References in corpus (12)
- Detection and Characterization of Exoplanets and Disks using Projections on Karhunen-Loeve Eigenimages
- On the Luminosity of Young Jupiters
- The Palomar/Keck Adaptive Optics Survey of Young Solar Analogs: Evidence for a Universal Companion Mass Function
- Optical Vectorial Vortex Coronagraphs using Liquid Crystal Polymers: theory, manufacturing and laboratory demonstration
- PALM-3000: Exoplanet Adaptive Optics for the 5-meter Hale Telescope
- Direct Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Candidate Companion Below/Near the Deuterium-Burning Limit In The Young Binary Star System, ROXs 42B
- Direct Imaging Discovery of a Jovian Exoplanet Within a Triple Star System
- Improved High Contrast Imaging with On-Axis Telescopes using a Multi-Stage Vortex Coronagraph
- First On-Sky High Contrast Imaging with an Apodizing Phase Plate
- Speckle suppression and companion detection using coherent differential imaging
- An H-band Vector Vortex Coronagraph for the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme-Adaptive Optics System
- SLM-based Digital Adaptive Coronagraphy: Current Status and Capabilities