Program: GS-2016A-Q-69

What does the emission spectrum of a young jupiter-like planet look like? We do not know as no such object has ever been directly imaged, but these planets are within our reach. Arguably, the most useful 3 Mjup planet 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. We are currently gathering a large dataset to try to identify such objects through deep [3.6] and [4.5] imaging from SPITZER and deep seeing-limited J and z imaging of all 181 young (<120 Myr) systems within 70pc of the Sun, which will reveal distant planetary companions through their distinctively red z-J and [4.5]-[3.6] color. The present proposal targets 19 stellar systems in this sample. This program has been going on since 2014B, data for the 76 targets observed to date meet our science requirements and demonstrates 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.