Increasing the raw contrast of VLT/SPHERE with the dark hole technique. II. On-sky wavefront correction and coherent differential imaging - INSU - Institut national des sciences de l'Univers Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Astronomy and Astrophysics - A&A Année : 2022

Increasing the raw contrast of VLT/SPHERE with the dark hole technique. II. On-sky wavefront correction and coherent differential imaging

Résumé

Context. Direct imaging of exoplanets takes advantage of state-of-the-art adaptive optics (AO) systems, coronagraphy, and postprocessing techniques. Coronagraphs attenuate starlight to mitigate the unfavorable flux ratio between an exoplanet and its host star. AO systems provide diffraction-limited images of point sources and minimize optical aberrations that would cause starlight to leak through coronagraphs. Post-processing techniques then estimate and remove residual stellar speckles due to hardware limitations, such as noncommon path aberrations (NCPAs) and diffraction from telescope obscurations, and identify potential companions.
Aims: We aim to demonstrate an efficient method to minimize the speckle intensity due to NCPAs and the underlying stellar diffraction pattern during an observing night on the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Expolanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) instrument without any hardware modifications.
Methods: We implement an iterative dark-hole (DH) algorithm to remove stellar speckles on-sky before a science observation. It uses a pair-wise probing estimator and a controller based on electric field conjugation, originally developed for space-based application. This work presents the first such on-sky minimization of speckles with a DH technique on SPHERE.
Results: We show the standard deviation of the normalized intensity in the raw images is reduced by a factor of up to five in the corrected region with respect to the current calibration strategy under median conditions for VLT. This level of contrast performance obtained with only 1 min of exposure time reaches median performances on SPHERE that use post-processing methods requiring ~1h-long sequences of observations. The resulting raw contrast improvement provides access to potentially fainter and lower-mass exoplanets closer to their host stars. We also present an alternative a posteriori calibration method that takes advantage of the starlight coherence and improves the post-processed contrast levels rms by a factor of about three with respect to the raw images.
Conclusions: This on-sky demonstration represents a decisive milestone for the future design, development, and observing strategy of the next generation of ground-based exoplanet imagers for 10-m to 40-m telescopes.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
aa44185-22.pdf (1.93 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

insu-03874896 , version 1 (28-11-2022)

Licence

Paternité

Identifiants

Citer

A. Potier, J. Mazoyer, Z. Wahhaj, P. Baudoz, G. Chauvin, et al.. Increasing the raw contrast of VLT/SPHERE with the dark hole technique. II. On-sky wavefront correction and coherent differential imaging. Astronomy and Astrophysics - A&A, 2022, 665, ⟨10.1051/0004-6361/202244185⟩. ⟨insu-03874896⟩
19 Consultations
14 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More