Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets

By B. Bowler. 2016

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High-contrast adaptive optics (AO) imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past decade and especially the last few years with the advent of high-order AO systems, dedicated planet-finding instruments with specialized coronagraphs, and innovative observing and post-processing strategies to suppress speckle noise. This review summarizes recent progress in high-contrast imaging with particular emphasis on observational results, discoveries near and below the deuterium-burning limit, and a practical overview of large-scale surveys and dedicated instruments. I conclude with a statistical meta-analysis of deep imaging surveys in the literature. Based on observations of 384 unique and single young (≈5–300 Myr) stars spanning stellar masses between 0.1 and 3.0 M⊙, the overall occurrence rate of 5–13 MJup companions at orbital distances of 30–300 au is 0.6 − 0.5 + 0.7 % assuming hot-start evolutionary models. The most massive giant planets regularly accessible to direct imaging are about as rare as hot Jupiters are around Sun-like stars. Dividing this sample into individual stellar mass bins does not reveal any statistically significant trend in planet frequency with host mass: giant planets are found around 2.8 − 2.3 + 3.7 % of BA stars, <4.1% of FGK stars, and <3.9% of M dwarfs. Looking forward, extreme AO systems and the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes with smaller inner working angles and deeper detection limits will increase the pace of discovery to ultimately map the demographics, composition, evolution, and origin of planets spanning a broad range of masses and ages.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e95a37409b966ebfa503211c338bfd3c42b83439

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Mordasini
2. Th. Henning
3. B. Bowler
4. A. Tokovinin
5. E. Chiang
6. Ilaria Pascucci
7. G. Mulders
8. Paul Mollière

In Education

1. C. Mordasini
2. A. Mann
3. Ilaria Pascucci
4. G. Mulders
5. A. Tokovinin
6. D. Apai
7. G. Lodato

In Instrumentation

1. A. Tokovinin
2. R. Gratton
3. C. Mordasini
4. R. Dong
5. A. Mann
6. Th. Henning
7. V. D’Orazi
8. C. Moutou

Citations in the corpus

• Predictions of the WFIRST Microlensing Survey. I. Bound Planet Detection Rates (2018, background): “…in the solar neighborhood (e.g., Udry & Santos 2007; Winn & Fabrycky 2015), and direct imaging studies of young planets at large separations (e.g., Bowler 2016), are beginning to reveal the complex distribution of exoplanets as a function of mass and separation from their host stars, and the…”
• The Sirius System and Its Astrophysical Puzzles: Hubble Space Telescope and Ground-based Astrometry (2017, background): “…searches for a resolved companion using high-contrast imaging have failed to reveal one down to limits corresponding to masses of several times that of Jupiter (e.g., Schroeder et al. 2000; Bonnet-Bidaud et al. 2000; Thalmann et al. 2011; Vigan et al. 2015; Bowler 2016; and references therein).”
• Multiple Disk Gaps and Rings Generated by a Single Super-Earth (2017, background): “The current detection limit of such instruments is ∼1MJ for planets a few Myr old (e.g., Bowler 2016).”
• SOAR TESS Survey. I. Sculpting of TESS Planetary Systems by Stellar Companions (2019, background): “However, brown dwarfs on close transits seem to be inherently rarer than massive planets (Bowler 2016).”
• Discovery of a warm, dusty giant planet around HIP 65426 (2017, background): “More than a decade of direct imaging surveys targeting several hundred young, nearby stars have revealed that the occurrence of giant planets at wide orbits (≥ 20 − 40 au) is relatively low (e.g. Bowler 2016).”
• Magellan Adaptive Optics Imaging of PDS 70: Measuring the Mass Accretion Rate of a Young Giant Planet within a Gapped Disk (2018, background): “Indeed, on the order of a dozen super-Jupiters have been discovered in recent years orbiting nearby young stars (see the recent review by Bowler 2016).”
• Gaps and Rings in an ALMA Survey of Disks in the Taurus Star-forming Region (2018, background): “Very few stars have massive planets at large radii, and even fewer planets are found around M dwarfs (see review by Bowler 2016); however, current sensitivities prevent the detection of the lower-mass planets that would create the gaps located at 31 In the contemporaneous study of CI Tau (Clarke et…”