Imaging Young Planets From Ground and Space

Understand

High contrast imaging can find and characterize gas giant planets around nearby young stars and the closest M stars, complementing radial velocity and astrometric searches by exploring orbital separations inaccessible to indirect methods.

• Ground-based coronagraphs are already probing within 25 AU of nearby young stars to find objects as small as ~ 3 Jupiter masses.
• This paper compares near-term and future ground-based capabilities with high contrast imaging modes of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
• Monte Carlo modeling reveals that JWST can detect planets with masses as small as 0.2 MJup across a broad range of orbital separations.