Towards a more comprehensive understanding of exo-planetary worlds with direct imaging (Update)

Séminaire IPAG de Laurent Pueyo (STScI), vendredi 20 décembre 2013 à 10h30, IPAG Vercors room

Direct imaging mitigates selection effects inherent to the currently known exo-planetary population, since it is sensitive to objects in an orbital space orthogonal to the one available with indirect methods. Upcoming campaigns will alleviate this selection effect by surveying young and adolescent stars and use high-contrast instruments to direct probe for signatures of their formation history. In this presentation I will discuss the wealth of astrophysical information accessible using such surveys and describe recent progresses in both instrumentation and data analysis which will facilitate these large scale observational efforts. In particular I will illustrate how to take advantage of these techniques to analyze data from one of the largest homogenous direct imaging surveys to date : the aggregate of all HST-NICMOS coronagraphic observations carried out between 1998 and 2006. I will finally present recent results obtained with the Project P1640 Integral Field Spectrograph, installed at the Palomar Hale Telescope, with a particular emphasis on the techniques we have developed for this class of simultaneous multi-wavelengths observations and their impact on the characterization of the planetary systems already observed during the earlier stages of our 100 night survey.