Lights in Motion Observing Nearby Planets with Imaging, Wavefront Sensing, Orbital Detection, and Spectroscopy

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dc.contributor.authorThompson, William
dc.contributor.supervisorMarois, Christian
dc.contributor.supervisorHerwig, Falk
dc.date.accessioned2023-09-27T18:21:04Z
dc.date.available2023-09-27T18:21:04Z
dc.date.copyright2023en_US
dc.date.issued2023-09-27
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Physics and Astronomyen_US
dc.degree.levelDoctor of Philosophy Ph.D.en_US
dc.description.abstractTo place our solar system into a wider context, astronomers must study a broad sample of planets around Sun-like stars in detail. This will require a combination of indirect evidence and direct imaging, which is the focus of this dissertation. Directly imaging solar system analogues is a challenging endeavour that is to a large extent, limited by our instruments and analysis techniques. This dissertation describes how some of these challenges can be overcome from many directions. First, it presents a new analysis technique that re-evaluates how we treat the problem of analyzing direct imaging data called direct signal-to-noise optimization. This approach can provide a three to five times reduction of speckle noise close to the star when applied to angular differential imaging data. Second, it presents applications of an approach for combining images in the presence of orbital motion. This removes a sensitivity limit to direct imaging caused by orbital smearing. It results in near-ideal scaling of sensitivity with square root of the number of observations. Additionally, this technique is extended to arbitrarily combine direct and indirect sources of evidence for planets. Next, this dissertation demonstrates improved instrumentation that could increase the sensitivity of future instruments. It demonstrates the Fast Atmospheric Self-Coherent Camera Technique in a laboratory environment and presents a five hundred times reduction in quasi-static speckles. It then presents a concept for an imaging Fourier transform spectrograph that could combine a self-coherent camera with high resolution spectral information at a resolution of 5,000 to 20,000. It demonstrates such an imaging spectrograph in a laboratory environment and shows how spectro-coherent differential imaging can lead to an approximately forty times reduction in speckle noise. Lastly, it describes a speculative concept for a constellation of orbital retroreflector beacons that could one day lead to the imaging of Earth-like planets from the ground. The analysis techniques developed in this dissertation are applied to a deep, targeted survey of the HR 8799 planetary system. This results in tight limits on any additional outer planets and the detection of a fifth candidate planet at just 4 AU separation, which would be one of the closest separation planets ever directly detected. These results will change how future surveys and searches for planets are completed, and ultimately contribute to understanding the Earth’s place in our local neighbourhood.en_US
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduateen_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationThompson, W. & Marois, C. (2019) Extremely Bright Orbital Guide Beacons for Extremely Large Telescopes, Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 6 Proceedingen_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationThompson, W. and Marois, C. (2021) Improved Contrast in Images of Exoplanets using Direct SNR Optimization, Astronomical Journalen_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationThompson, W., Marois, C., Singh, G., et al, (2022) Performance of the Fast Atmospheric Self Coherent camera at the NEW-EARTH lab and a simplified measurement algorithm, Proceedings of the SPIEen_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationThompson, W., Marois, C., et al, (2023) Deep orbital search for additional planets in the HR8799 system, Astronomical Journalen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1828/15444
dc.languageEnglisheng
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.subjectDirect Imagingen_US
dc.subjectExoplanetsen_US
dc.subjectWavefront Controlen_US
dc.subjectSpectroscopyen_US
dc.subjectOrbital Modellingen_US
dc.titleLights in Motion Observing Nearby Planets with Imaging, Wavefront Sensing, Orbital Detection, and Spectroscopyen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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