Development of space coronagraph for study of extrasolar planets

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Extrasolar planets are extremely faint compared to a star. Hence it is needed to use a coronagraph to block the star light. However, for this purpose we need a telescope with extremely high accuracy, which is difficult to fabricate. We proposed to use a deformable mirror, which can deform the shape of the mirror, to cancel out the surface figure errors of a telescope. By the laboratory experiment, we showed that a planet which is 10^-6 and 10^-4 fainter than a star can be detected at the He-Ne laser wavelength and the broad-band light respectively.