Direct Explorations of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru

M. Tamura (NAOJ), and the SEEDS team

Since the first detection of exoplanets orbiting normal stars in 1995, 
many exciting discoveries have been made, but our understanding 
of planetary systems and their formation is far from complete. 
Armed with new coronagraph HiCIAO and new adaptive optics, we 
will conduct a survey searching for giant planets (1 MJ < mass <13 
MJ) as well as protoplanetary and debris disks at a few to a few tens 
of AU region around ~500 nearby solar-type or more massive young 
stars. This project, SEEDS, is the first Subaru Strategic 
Observations. As demonstrated with recent successes of direct 
imaging of planetary mass objects around Vega-type A stars, direct 
imaging is indispensable for the detection of such "young" planets, 
especially planets beyond the snowline (4-40AU), which is 
complementary to radial velocity searches. We have conducted a 
thorough target selection during the last one year. In this talk, we 
will first overview the Subaru results with the previous coronagraph 
CIAO. Then we will outline the SEEDS goal, target selection 
processes, and expected results.