High-Contrast Imaging: Hide and Seek with Exoplanets

TL;DR

High-contrast imaging is a promising technique for directly detecting and studying exoplanets at wide separations, overcoming limitations of other methods and advancing our understanding of planetary system formation.

Contribution

This paper reviews recent advancements in high-contrast imaging methods, instruments, and results, highlighting its potential for future exoplanet research.

Findings

Probed hundreds of stars with second-generation imagers.

Achieved high contrast levels enabling detection of faint companions.

Enhanced understanding of exoplanet demographics and formation.

Abstract

So far, most of the about 5700 exoplanets have been discovered mainly with radial velocity and transit methods. These techniques are sensitive to planets in close orbits, not being able to probe large star--planet separations. $\mu$-lensing is the indirect method that allows us to probe the planetary systems at the snow-line and beyond, but it is not a repeatable observation. On the contrary, direct imaging (DI) allows for the detection and characterization of low mass companions at wide separation (\mbox{$\leq$ 5--6 au}). The main challenge of DI is that a typical planet--star contrast ranges from $10^{-6}$, for a young Jupiter in emitted light, to $10^{-9}$ for Earth in reflected light. In the last two decades, a lot of efforts have been dedicated to combining large (D $\geq$ 5 m) telescopes (to reduce the impact of diffraction) with coronagraphs and high-order adaptive optics (to correct phase errors induced by atmospheric turbulence), with sophisticated image post-processing, to reach such a contrast between the star and the planet in order to detect and characterize cooler and closer companions to nearby stars. Building on the first pioneering instrumentation, the second generation of high-contrast imagers, SPHERE, GPI, and SCExAO, allowed us to probe hundreds of stars (e.g., 500--600 stars using SHINE and GPIES), contributing to a better understanding of the demography and the occurrence of planetary systems. The DI offers a possible clear vision for studying the formation and physical properties of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs, and the future DI (space and ground-based) instruments with deeper detection limits will enhance this vision. In this paper, we briefly review the methods, the instruments, the main sample of targeted stars, the remarkable results, and the perspective of this rising technique.