Exoplanet studies with CHARA-MIRC

Although direct direction of light from hot Jupiters has recently been achieved by measurements from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, information on those hot Jupiters are still not enough to break all the model degeneracies and provide detailed conclusions. More detections that can measure the astrometric orbits and flux variations of hot Jupiters, especially in the near-IR, are necessary. One promising way to reach this goal is to use precision closure phase measurements obtained with ground-based long baseline optical interferometers. Here we present our preliminary closure phase studies on the nearby hot Jupiter system υ And b using CHARA-MIRC. Our data analysis shows our closure phase precisions are at ~ 0.4σ and ~ 0.6σ level of the required signal for detections for the short and long triangles of CHARA respectively. In order to make real detections, we have several improvements in the future to increase the signal-to-noise of the data. Once these improvements are realized, our goal of directly detecting light from υ And b will be feasible to achieve.