Contributions > By speaker > Jones Nathalie

The Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) is a direct imaging campaign which targeted 600 young, nearby stars between 2014-19. GPI is designed to search for and spectroscopically characterize young-Jovian exoplanets. Results from the first 300 stars survey were presented in Nielsen et al. 2019. I will present my work on the analysis of candidates detected via forward-model matched filtering (FMMF) from the second half of the survey. The FMMF planet detection algorithm allows for increased sensitivity by incorporating instrumental PSF. To definitively rule out detections as real bound objects or background, I developed a spectral fitting routine using empirical and theoretical models of brown dwarfs and stars. Each GPI spectrum was fit against a catalogue of H-band spectra with known spectral type then plotted against output chi-squared. Lastly, I will discuss how the final categorization of all detected objects of interest allows us to produce contrast curves for the entire survey. These contrast curves, set by the false positive rate, provide insights on population statistics of Jovian exoplanets and on the impact of GPI in the direct imaging field.