While high-contrast imaging surveys in the past decade have produced only a handful of self-luminous exoplanets, they opened new gates for studying the forming environments of planetary systems. With multi-epoch and multi-wavelength imaging, I will talk about our ongoing efforts on scientific expeditions using current flagship observatories. They include (1) pinpointing the orbits of hidden planets that are responsible for substrutures in protoplanetary disks with multi-epoch imaging, (2) deciphering the mineral compositions of circumstellar disks with integral field spectroscopy, and (3) revealing the host galaxies of quasars. These expeditions are exploring beyond the conventional boundaries of our comprehension, reshaping our understanding of structures previously overwhelmed by bright central sources, and laying the groundwork for JWST, Roman, and ELT follow-ups.
BIO
Bin Ren is a Marie S.-Curie Fellow based at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France. After obtaining his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, he conducted postdoctoral work at California Institute of Technology before Europe. His research focuses on the interface between coronagraphic imaging and applied mathematics. Scientifically, he is leading the orbit mapping of hidden giant planets based on spiral motion in protoplanetary disks for their imaging with the next generation coronagraphs, extracting the mineralogical composition for circumstellar disks using reflectance spectroscopy, and pioneering the coronagraphic imaging of quasar host galaxies. Instrumentationally, he quantified the companion detection limits for the Hubble/STIS coronagraph, and he currently leads space-based calibration programs in probing into the inner 0.1 arcsec regions for Hubble and James Webb coronagraphs. He also works on developing mathematical tools to aid in science and instrumentation explorations in high-contrast imaging.
