thesis

Detecting Extrasolar Planets using IFS-based Simultaneous Differential Imaging

Abstract

Observations of extrasolar planets using Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS), if coupled with an extreme Adaptive Optics system and analyzed with a Simultaneous Differential Imaging technique (SDI), are a powerful tool to detect and characterize planets directly; they enhance the signal of the planet and, at the same time, reduces the impact of stellar light and consequently important noise sources like speckles. In order to verify the efficiency of such a technique, we developed a simulation code able to test the capabilities of this IFS-SDI technique for different kinds of planets and telescopes, modelling the atmospheric and instrumental noise sources. The procedure adopted to simulate IFS observations is presented here in detail, explaining in particular how we obtain estimates of the speckle noise, Adaptive Optics corrections, specific instrumental features, and how we test the efficiency of the SDI technique to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the planet detection. The first results obtained by the simulations show that many significant extrasolar planet detections are indeed possible using the present 8m-class telescopes within a few hours of exposure time. Furthermore, we provide here an estimation on the impact of extremely large telescope diameters on the detection of planets with IFS-SDI

    Similar works