Simulating the effects of exozodiacal dust in WFIRST CGI observations
Author(s)
Douglas, Ewan S.; Debes, John; Milani, Kian; Xin, Yinzi; Cahoy, Kerri; Lewis, Nikole K.; Macintosh, Bruce; ... Show more Show less
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© COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only. The WFIRST Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) will image the environment close to stars at orders of magnitude higher sensitivity than current observatories. In addition to directly imaging giant exoplanets, WFIRST CGI has unprecedented sensitivity to scattered light from circumstellar dust. Most modeling has been confined to the dark-hole regime of the coronagraph (approximately 0.15 arcsec to 1 arcsec). This work uses publicly available field-dependent point spread functions to model an exozodiacal disk within the 0.15 arcsec inner working angle. For this simple Solar System-like test case, we find an approximately 25% increase in the transmitted exozodiacal flux due to light inside the inner working angle. We also describe plans to accelerate and extend this modeling to a wider range of geometries, and to quantify the impact on post-processing and source detection.
Date issued
2019-09-09Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and AstronauticsJournal
Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
Publisher
SPIE
Citation
Douglas, Ewan S., Debes, John, Milani, Kian, Xin, Yinzi, Cahoy, Kerri L. et al. 2019. "Simulating the effects of exozodiacal dust in WFIRST CGI observations." Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, 11117.
Version: Final published version
ISSN
0277-786X