Portable Adaptive Optics for Exoplanet Imaging

Yongtian Zhu; Jiangpei Dou; Xi Zhang; Gang Zhao; Jing Guo; Leopoldo Infante

Paper

Portable Adaptive Optics for Exoplanet Imaging

Abstract

The Portable Adaptive Optics (PAO) is a low-cost and compact system, designed for 4-meter class telescopes that have no Adaptive Optics (AO), because of the physical space limitation at the Nasmyth or Cassegrain focus and the historically high cost of the conventional AO. The initial scientific observations of the PAO are focused on the direct imaging of exoplanets and sub-stellar companions. This paper discusses the PAO concept and the associated high-contrast imaging performance in our recent observational runs. PAO is delivering a Strehl ratio better than

band under median seeing conditions of

. Combined with our dedicated image rotation and subtraction (IRS) technique and the optimized IRS (O-IRS) algorithm, the averaged contrast ratio for a

primary star is

and

at angular distance of

under exposure time of 7 minutes and 2 hours, respectively. PAO has successfully revealed the known exoplanet of

And b, in our recent observation at 3.5-meter ARC telescope at Apache Point Observatory. We have performed the associated astrometry and photometry analysis of the recovered

And b planet, which gives a projected separation of

, a position angle of

, and a mass of

. These results demonstrate that PAO can be used for direct imaging of exoplanets with medium-sized telescopes.