Directly Imaging Rocky Planets from the Ground
Abstract
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period planets, but are incomplete at longer periods where both the sensitivity of transit surveys and radial velocity signals plummet. Even more glaring is that the spectra of planets discovered with these indirect methods are either inaccessible (radial velocity detections) or only available for a small subclass of transiting planets with thick, clear atmospheres. Direct detection can be used to discover and characterize the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations, including non-transiting exoplanets. Today, a small number of exoplanets have been directly imaged, but they represent only a rare class of young, self-luminous super-Jovian-mass objects orbiting tens to hundreds of AU from their host stars. Atmospheric characterization of planets in the <5 AU regime, where radial velocity (RV) surveys have revealed an abundance of other worlds, is technically feasible with 30-m class apertures in combination with an advanced AO system, coronagraph, and suite of spectrometers and imagers. There is a vast range of unexplored science accessible through astrometry, photometry, and spectroscopy of rocky planets, ice giants, and gas giants. In this whitepaper we will focus on one of the most ambitious science goals --- detecting for the first time habitable-zone rocky (<1.6 R_Earth) exoplanets in reflected light around nearby M-dwarfs
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.04275,
title = {Directly Imaging Rocky Planets from the Ground},
author = {B. Mazin and É. Artigau and V. Bailey and C. Baranec and C. Beichman and B. Benneke and J. Birkby and T. Brandt and J. Chilcote and M. Chun and L. Close and T. Currie and I. Crossfield and R. Dekany and J. R. Delorme and C. Dong and R. Dong and R. Doyon and C. Dressing and M. Fitzgerald and J. Fortney and R. Frazin and E. Gaidos and O. Guyon and J. Hashimoto and L. Hillenbrand and A. Howard and R. Jensen-Clem and N. Jovanovic and T. Kotani and H. Kawahara and Q. Konopacky and H. Knutson and M. Liu and J. Lu and J. Lozi and B. Macintosh and J. Males and M. Marley and C. Marois and D. Mawet and S. Meeker and M. Millar-Blanchaer and S. Mondal and S. N. Bose and N. Murakami and R. Murray-Clay and N. Narita and T. S. Pyo and L. Roberts and G. Ruane and G. Serabyn and A. Shields and A. Skemer and L. Simard and D. Stelter and M. Tamura and M. Troy and G. Vasisht and J. K. Wallace and J. Wang and J. Wang and S. Wright},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.04275},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
8 pages, 1 figure, Astro2020 Science White Paper