Detecting Extrasolar Planets with Integral Field Spectroscopy

Observations of extrasolar planets using Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS),if coupled with an extreme Adaptive Optics system and analyzed with aSimultaneous Differential Imaging technique (SDI), are a powerful tool todetect and characterize extrasolar planets directly; they enhance the signal ofthe planet and, at the same time, reduces the impact of stellar light andconsequently important noise sources like speckles. In order to verify theefficiency of such a technique, we developed a simulation code able to test thecapabilities of this IFS-SDI technique for different kinds of planets andtelescopes, modelling the atmospheric and instrumental noise sources. The firstresults obtained by the simulations show that many significant extrasolarplanet detections are indeed possible using the present 8m-class telescopeswithin a few hours of exposure time. The procedure adopted to simulate IFSobservations is presented here in detail, explaining in particular how weobtain estimates of the speckle noise, Adaptive Optics corrections, specificinstrumental features, and how we test the efficiency of the SDI technique toincrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the planet detection. The most importantresults achieved by simulations of various objects, from 1 M_J to brown dwarfsof 30 M_J, for observations with an 8 meter telescope, are then presented anddiscussed.Comment: 60 pages, 37 figures, accepted in PASP, 4 Tables adde