Program: GS-2015A-Q-71

What does the emission spectrum of a young ~3 Mjup planet look like? We simply do not know as no such object has ever been directly imaged, but these planets are within our reach. Of all young 3 Mjup planets that one could possibly find today, which one would be the most useful to advance our knowledge? Arguably, it would be one that is bound to a star of known age, distance and metallicity but which has an orbit large enough that it can be studied as an "isolated" object using seeing-limited near-IR spectrographs. We propose to try to identify such objects through deep seeing-limited z and J-band imaging of all 225 young (<120 Myr) stars within 70pc of the Sun, which will reveal distant planetary companions through their distinctively red z-J color. The present proposal targets 26 stellar systems in this sample. This program was undertaken in 2014B, data of the 13 targets observed to date demonstrate that few false positives are expected for the entire survey. This survey will provide a unique sample of benchmark objects useful for all ongoing and future high-contrast imaging searches of exoplanets.