Exoplanet Imaging at the Palomar 5-m: Enhancing the Contrast of the Project 1640 Coronagraph

Details Exoplanet Imaging at the Palomar 5-m: Enhancing the Contrast of the Project 1640 Coronagraph Exoplanet Imaging at the Palomar 5-m: Enhancing the Contrast of the Project 1640 Coronagraph

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21443401r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #214, #434.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.704

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

Since 2008 July, the Project 1640 Coronagraph has been used to search for exo-planets using the Adaptive Optics system on the 5-m Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory. Project 1640's primary goal is to observe approximately 200 nearby young stars to directly image young Jovian planets and measure their spectra between 1.05 - 1.75 microns. The coronagraph has achieved contrasts of 10-4. The contrast is limited by quasi-static speckle noise, much of which is caused by non-common path aberrations that are unsensed by the adaptive optics wavefront sensor. These quasi-static speckles will be corrected with a calibration wavefront sensor. This is a phase-shifting interferometer mounted after the coronagraph and measures the wavefront at H-band, and feeds the result to the deformable mirror. This corrects the non-common path aberrations and eliminates the speckles, increasing the contrast up to 10-7. The calibration wavefront sensor is expected to be fully operational when the upgraded Palm-3000 Adaptive Optics system is installed at Palomar in late 2010.

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