ABSTRACT

Imaging exoplanets provides a tremendous amount of information about their formation process within their environment, their orbital motion and their atmospheric composition. However this is a challenging task to reach the very high-resolution (less than 500mas) and very high-contrast (less than 10^-6 in the near-infrared) required to detect exoplanets by imaging. To do so, specific ground-based instruments have been built worldwide, equipped with extreme adaptive optics systems and coronagraphs, delivering images on which advanced post-processing must be applied to unveil exoplanet companions. However the deeper we go in contrast, the more sensitive we are to small error terms that were hindered before and can now limit the contrast performance of the instrument. I will review these error terms based on the SPHERE images and emphasise on one of them: the wind driven halo, originating from the high speed jet stream atmospheric layer. These considerations are driving the design of the next generation of high-contrast instruments for the ELT whose first light is foreseen in 2026.
 
  

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