Non Common Path Aberrations Correction

The primary goal of this thesis was the correction of Non-Common-Path-Aberrations in the SPHERE instrument for helping it meeting its contrast requirements. SPHERE's purpose is the search and characterization of giant exo-planets around nearby stars. The author implemented a method called Electric Field Conjugation that he tested in simulation as well as on the real system. A full week was booked in SPHERE schedule a few days before the second commissioning in June 2014. It gave the opportunity to the author to travel to the VLT in Chile and experiment directly on the system. The contrast gain objective of another order of magnitude in a medium-sized area has successfully been reached bringing SPHERE raw speckle contrast from about $10^{-6}$ to $10^{-7}$. The algorithm has therefore proven its value and will be further investigated and hopefully automated by the SPHERE team based on the codes developed by the author. However it is important to keep in mind that Electric Field Conjugation is more effective for follow-up studies in order to improve the quality of the observations. Indeed the area for a good correction is very limited. It can't be used for exo-planets discovery unless the corrected area is made big enough but the performance will be less.Comment: Projet de fin d'\'etudes 2014, ISAE-Supaer

Improving and Assessing Planet Sensitivity of the GPI Exoplanet Survey with a Forward Model Matched Filter

We present a new matched-filter algorithm for direct detection of point sources in the immediate vicinity of bright stars. The stellar point-spread function (PSF) is first subtracted using a Karhunen-Loéve image processing (KLIP) algorithm with angular and spectral differential imaging (ADI and SDI). The KLIP-induced distortion of the astrophysical signal is included in the matched-filter template by computing a forward model of the PSF at every position in the image. To optimize the performance of the algorithm, we conduct extensive planet injection and recovery tests and tune the exoplanet spectra template and KLIP reduction aggressiveness to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of the recovered planets. We show that only two spectral templates are necessary to recover any young Jovian exoplanets with minimal S/N loss. We also developed a complete pipeline for the automated detection of point-source candidates, the calculation of receiver operating characteristics (ROC), contrast curves based on false positives, and completeness contours. We process in a uniform manner more than 330 data sets from the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey and assess GPI typical sensitivity as a function of the star and the hypothetical companion spectral type. This work allows for the first time a comparison of different detection algorithms at a survey scale accounting for both planet completeness and false-positive rate. We show that the new forward model matched filter allows the detection of 50% fainter objects than a conventional cross-correlation technique with a Gaussian PSF template for the same false-positive rate

Gemini Planet Imager Observational Calibrations III: Empirical Measurement Methods and Applications of High-Resolution Microlens PSFs

The newly commissioned Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) combines extreme adaptive optics, an advanced coronagraph, precision wavefront control and a lenslet-based integral field spectrograph (IFS) to measure the spectra of young extrasolar giant planets between 0.9-2.5 um. Each GPI detector image, when in spectral model, consists of ~37,000 microspectra which are under or critically sampled in the spatial direction. This paper demonstrates how to obtain high-resolution microlens PSFs and discusses their use in enhancing the wavelength calibration, flexure compensation and spectral extraction. This method is generally applicable to any lenslet-based integral field spectrograph including proposed future instrument concepts for space missions.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. Proceedings of the SPIE, 9147-282 v2: reference adde

Constraining PDS 70b’s Formation Mechanism with Multi-hydrogen-emission Observations

We present our Keck/OSIRIS observations of the Paβ emission line (1.282 μm) to investigate accretion mechanisms of PDS 70 planetary system. Our spectral differential imaging reduction to remove the stellar PSF resulted in null detection of Paβ at the locations of PDS 70b and c. The 5σ detection limit of Paβ compared with the theoretical model of Aoyama & Ikoma (2019) indicates the gas velocity onto PDS 70b is smaller than 70 km s⁻¹, which suggests MUSE-based Hα studies overestimated the gas velocity and the mass of PDS 70b

Spiral Arm Pattern Motion in the SAO 206462 Protoplanetary Disk

Spiral arms have been observed in more than a dozen protoplanetary disks, yet the origin of nearly all systems is under debate. Multi-epoch monitoring of spiral arm morphology offers a dynamical way to distinguish two leading arm formation mechanisms: companion-driven and gravitational instability induction, since these mechanisms predict distinct motion patterns. By analyzing multi-epoch J-band observations of the SAO 206462 system using the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope in 2015 and 2016, we measure the pattern motion for its two prominent spiral arms in polarized light. On one hand, if both arms are comoving, they can be driven by a planet at 86₋₁₃⁺¹⁸ au on a circular orbit, with gravitational instability motion ruled out. On the other hand, they can be driven by two planets at 120₋₃₀⁺³⁰ au and 49₋₅⁺⁶ au, offering tentative evidence (3.0σ) that the two spirals are moving independently. The independent arm motion is possibly supported by our analysis of a re-reduction of archival observations using the NICMOS instrument on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 1998 and 2005, yet artifacts including shadows can manifest spurious arm motion in HST observations. We expect future re-observations to better constrain the motion mechanism for the SAO 206462 spiral arms