Rebecca Oppenheimer
American Museum of Natural History
Direct Imaging of Exoplanets
The study of planets orbiting other stars has been a hot topic in astronomy
for some time now. The scientific questions that must be answered by this
field are profound and simply fascinating, spanning astronomy, geology,
atmospheric physics and perhaps eventually biology. Yet, we know so little
about these planets because they are difficult to study spectroscopically.
However, the limits on our abilities to study these "exoplanets" in detail
are steadily being broken as several centers around the world work toward
the highest contrast images ever made in any field of inquiry. I will
describe our efforts at AMNH in exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy, while
highlighting two of our main projects: an active search on going at Palomar,
called Project 1640, and the Gemini Planet Imager.