Coronagraphic Methods for Direct Imaging of Extra-Solar Planets

Abstract

The goal of directly detecting the presence of planets around the nearby stars is one of great scientific interest and extreme difficulty. At visible wavelengths a Jupiter-sized planet around a nearby star 5 parsecs away is about one billion times fainter than the parent star and only 1 arcsec away. To extract such a small signal out of the background of scattered and diffracted light from the central star requires extraordinarily smooth optics at mid-spatial frequencies with instrumentation designed to reduce diffracted light.