2016/05/09 by Brendan P. Bowler · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.EP
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1538-3873/128/968/102001
PASP invited review, accepted
arxiv created 2016/05/09 · arxiv updated 2016/09/07
High-contrast adaptive optics imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past decade and especially the last few years with the advent of high-order adaptive optics systems, dedicated planet-finding instruments with specialized coronagraphs, and innovative observing and post-processing strategies to suppress speckle noise. This review summarizes recent progress in high-contrast imaging with particular emphasis on observational results, discoveries near and below the deuterium-burning limit, and a practical overview of large-scale surveys and dedicated instruments. I conclude with a statistical meta-analysis of deep imaging surveys in the literature. Based on observations of 384 unique and single young (≈5--300~Myr) stars spanning stellar masses between 0.1--3.0~\Msun, the overall occurrence rate of 5--13~\Mjup companions at orbital distances of 30--300~AU is 0.6+0.7-0.5% assuming hot-start evolutionary models. The most massive giant planets regularly accessible to direct imaging are about as rare as hot Jupiters are around Sun-like stars. Dividing this sample into individual stellar mass bins does not reveal any statistically-significant trend in planet frequency with host mass: giant planets are found around 2.8+3.7-2.3% of BA stars, <4.1% of FGK stars, and <3.9% of M dwarfs. Looking forward, extreme adaptive optics systems and the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes with smaller inner working angles and deeper detection limits will increase the pace of discovery to ultimately map the demographics, composition, evolution, and origin of planets spanning a broad range of masses and ages.