event
Tuesday 26 May 2009: Matters of contrast -- searches for exoplanets
Dr Fraser Clarke - University of Oxford
Physics, 4th Floor interaction area 13:00-14:00
Extrasolar planets are surprisingly bright. Seen from ten parsecs, Jupiter would be 26th magnitude - a relatively easy proposition. 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.
