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Friday, 15th May at 3.30pm at the JAC
Fraser Clarke
Univ. Oxford
"Matters of contrast - imaging exoplanets"
ABSTRACT: Extrasolar planets are surprisingly bright. Seen from ten parsecs,
Jupiter would be 22nd magnitude - an easy proposition for almost any
telescope in the past 30 years. Why then, have we only in the last 6
months imaged an extrasolar planet? The problem, of course, is that the
Sun, seen from ten parsecs, is 5th magnitude and only 0.5 arcseconds away
from Jupiter. The real issue with imaging extrasolar planets is contrast.
In this talk I will present several approaches we have taken to dealing
with contrast. I will summarise our large Gemini/VLT programme to search
for planets around white dwarfs; intrinsically faint stars offering a
contrast gain of 10^4 over main sequence stars. I will also describe a
technique we have developed to obtain high contrast spectroscopy with
integral field spectrographs. Finally I will present on-going work to
prove and develop high contrast IFS for the EPICS planet hunting
instrument on the 42m European-ELT.
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