Towards a more exhaustive understanding of exo-planetary worlds with direct imaging.

Laurent Pueyo (John Hopkins University)

Upcoming direct imaging surveys will mitigate selection effects
inherent to the currently known exo-planetary population since they
are sensitive to objects in an orbital space orthogonal to the one
available with indirect methods. In as such, they are a critical
component of comparative exo-planetology since they will help refine a
statistical distribution of planetary mass objects less sensitive to
observational, biases. I will first discuss the how current upcoming
imaging surveys improve this completeness problem. In particular I
will focus on two recent recent results in coronagraphic data
reduction that have enabled significant progress towards estimates of
the bulk physical properties and atmospheric chemistry of know
exo-planetary systems. (1) I will discuss a novel solution to the
problem of IFS spectro-photometry in the high speckle noise regime
based learnings from the Palomar P1640 survey. (2) I will also present
our recent result regarding the astrometric characterization of the
multiple planetary system HR8799 discovered in the HST-NICMOS archive,
and discuss our current effort to reduce the full HST NICMOS archive
at unprecedented contrast depth. The second part of this presentation
will be devoted to introducing solutions they will allow astronomers
to probe an even lower mass regime with future observatories:
Extremelly Large Telescopes and potential direct imaging missions.