A high-contrast coronagraph for earth-like exoplanet direct imaging: design and test
Abstract
The high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging earth-like exoplanet at the visible needs a contrast of 10^(-10) at a small angular separation of 4 lambda/D or less. Here we report our recent laboratory experiment that is close to the limits. The test of the high-contrast imaging coronagraph is based on our step-transmission apodized filter. To achieve the goal, we use a liquid crystal array (LCA) as a phase corrector to create a dark hole based on our dedicated focal dark algorithm. We have suppressed the diffracted and speckle noise near the star point image to a level of 1.68 x 10^(-9) at 4 lambda/D, which can be immediately used for the direct imaging of Jupiter like exoplanets. This demonstrates that high-contrast coronagraph telescope in space has the potentiality to detect and characterize earth-like planets.
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- June 2014
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.1406.2364
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1406.2364
- Bibcode:
- 2014arXiv1406.2364L
- Keywords:
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- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics