CaltechAUTHORS
Published December 2020 | Published
Journal Article Open

Quantifying the Effect of Coronagraphs on Planet Photometry with the James Webb Space Telescope

Adams, Jea ORCID icon
Wang, Jason ORCID icon
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Abstract

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021 will revolutionize exoplanetary science by providing detailed characterizations of exoplanets within the infrared range of 3–13 microns. This is of particular interest to the field of direct imaging, where empirical models that remove excess starlight from imaged extrasolar systems have proven vital to the discovery of exoplanets. pyKLIP is one of the most modern python libraries with such capabilities, allowing its users to reveal exoplanets hidden behind the starlight. However, the pyKLIP algorithms are not presently able to handle coronagraph usage with the incoming JWST data. In preparation for the launch of this telescope, we upgraded pyKLIPs ability to correct for a coronagraph's effect on the throughput of off-axis sources when determining photometry. Given the coronagraph's transmission profile, pyKLIP v2.2 is now able to successfully account for each of NIRCam's five coronagraphs.

Additional Information

© 2020 The American Astronomical Society. Published 2020 December 10. This work would not be possible without the support of Dr. Dimitri Mawet and the Mawet Group at Caltech. We would also like to thank Laurent Pueyo for providing us with the simulations that we used in this project. This project was supported by a grant from STScI (JWST-ERS-01386) under NASA contract NAS5-03127. J. W. is supported by the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship sponsored by the Heising–Simons Foundation.

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Identifiers Funding Dates
Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023