Exoplanet Imaging in the 21st Century: Tools and Techniques for a New Era of Detailed Exoplanet Characterization

In the last thirty years, over 3,000 planets have been discovered orbiting nearby stars.  However, this menagerie of new worlds represents only a part of the planet formation parameter space: the most prolific methods for exoplanet discovery, transits and radial velocities, are sensitive to close-in planets, but largely miss bodies at wider separations like our own Saturn.  Further, only a small number of the planets discovered with these methods are amenable to spectroscopic follow-up observations.  Exoplanet imaging, however, is a versatile method for exoplanet discovery and characterization that relies on the largest aperture telescopes and extreme adaptive optics systems.  In this talk, I will describe two avenues for advancing the state-of-the-art in exoplanet imaging: 1) detecting low-mass exoplanets at Solar System separations at the W. M. Keck Observatory and Thiry Meter Telescope via predictive wavefront control, and 2) characterizing the atmospheres of directly imaged planets and brown dwarfs with polarimetry - an untapped method for probing the physics of clouds in the asmospheres of other worlds.

Speaker: Rebecca Jensen-Clem, UC Berkeley