Star Party - How do we image exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope?

Imaging exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the Sun) is key in understanding planetary formation, the Solar System’s history, and a window into the processes (and possibly life) on other worlds. Direct imaging, a method of exoplanet discovery intuitive in concept, is notoriously difficult in reality: with planets quadrillions of kilometers away from Earth, we require extremely precise instrumentation to be able to resolve planet light separately from their host stars. At the moment, the coldest and lowest mass exoplanets imaged are still several orders bigger than even the largest Solar System gas giants; by pushing to thermal infrared imaging with the James Webb Space Telescope, we can observe self-luminous gas giants for the very first time. In this talk we will be discussing why exoplanets are so important, what makes it difficult to discover exoplanets using direct imaging, and dive into the latest efforts in imaging self-luminous gas giant exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope. 

Klaus Subbotina Stephenson (she/any pronouns) is a Ph.D. student at UVic, working primarily at NRC Herzberg on developing and using cutting-edge instrumentation across ground and space telescopes for exoplanet science. For the past several years Klaus has been involved in a variety of James Webb Space Telescope programs and projects from imaging debris disks to searching for the undiscovered sub-Jupiter mass exoplanet population. At NRC Herzberg Klaus works on REVOLT, the observatory’s on-sky technology research testbed, where she is developing a Machine-Learning based wavefront sensor to enable better imaging of exoplanets through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.