Development of a differential stellar coronograph for direct search of exoplanets

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We conducted several optical simulation experiments for detecting directly exoplanets and observing their spectra. Our method is based on the polarization differential stellar coronagraph that has been proposed by Baba and Murakami. Starlight is generally considered to be unpolarized. On the other hand the light from its planet is expected to be partially polarized, because the planetary light is the scattered and reflected one by the parent starlight. When we observe a star-planet system with mutually orthogonal polarized light and take the difference of these two images, the unpolarized component is cancelled out and the partially polarized component remains. This is the principle of the polarization differential method.However, the simple polarization differentiation does not always produce good results. Therefore, we have proposed to conduct the analysis of the degree of polarization for image and objective spectra. Here, the degree of polarization means a value of the difference between two orthogonally linear polarizations normalized by the intensity at the point. We can discriminate planetary light from noisy starlight.In our optical simulation we set the degree of polarization of a planet model to 50%. An angular distance between a star model and its planet model is set to 4.8λ/D, where λ is the central wavelength for observation and D a diameter of a telescope. An intensity ratio of the planet model to the star model is 1.1x10^<-5>. In the polarization differential image we could not discriminate the planetary image from speckle noise, but we could clearly identify the planetary image from the representation of the degree of polarization.We also conducted the experiment to obtain objective spectra of exoplanets. Our experimental results show that the analysis of the polarization degree is also very useful to distinguish planetary spectrum from noisy stellar spectra.