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The Dome C: A unique site for high-contrast imaging and extrasolar planet searching with a large telescope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2006

M. Giard ,
F. Casoli ,
F. Paletou ,
O. Lardière ,
M. Carbillet ,
A. Riccardi ,
P. Salinari  and
C. Aime
O. Lardière*
Affiliation:
INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy;
M. Carbillet
Affiliation:
INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy;
A. Riccardi
Affiliation:
INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy;
P. Salinari
Affiliation:
INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy;
C. Aime
Affiliation:
LUAN-UMR 6525, Univ. de Nice, Parc Valrose, 06108 Nice Cedex 2, France
*
[email protected]
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Abstract


The Dome C should benefit from an outstanding atmospheric qualityduring the night due to catabatic wind conditions (wind speed ~ 2 m s-1, r0 ~ 0.3 m). From analytical and numericalsimulations, we show that these seeing conditions are veryadvantageous for high-contrast imaging and coronagraphic search ofexoplanets in the near-IR with adaptive optics (AO): from the DomeC, the planet SNR is 4 times greater than from Mauna-Kea.
For these reasons, the Dome C seems to be the natural site for aPlanet-Finder consisting in a 2–8 m (possibly off-axis) monolithictelescope equipped with a fast and extreme AO (f ~ 1–2 kHz, f ~ cm), a low-aliasing wave-front sensor (WFS), acoronagraph and a speckle-noise subtraction. In these optimalconditions, a 3.6 m and a 8.2 m-telescope can respectively detect aJupiter-size and an Earth-size planet at 10 pc in 10h in J band. Lastly, a 15–30 m ELT located at the Dome C could performfast spectral analysis of Earth-like planets for biomarkersearching.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Astronomical Society Publications Series , Volume 14: Dome C Astronomy and Astrophysics Meeting , 2005 , pp. 291 - 296
Copyright
© EAS, EDP Sciences, 2005

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