English

The Demographics of Wide-Separation Planets

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2022-03-02 v1

Abstract

I begin this review by first defining what is meant by exoplanet demographics, and then motivating why we would like as broad a picture of exoplanet demographics as possible. I then outline the methodology and pitfalls to measuring exoplanet demographics in practice. I next review the methods of detecting exoplanets, focusing on the ability of these methods to detect wide separation planets. For the purposes of this review, I define wide separation as separations beyond the 'snow line' of the protoplanetary disk, which is at roughly 3\sim3 au for a sunlike star. I note that this definition is somewhat arbitrary, and the practical boundary depends on the host star mass, planet mass and radius, and detection method. I review the approximate scaling relations for the signal-to-noise ratio for the detectability of exoplanets as a function of the relevant physical parameters, including the host star properties. I provide abroad overview of what has already been learned from the transit, radial velocity, direct imaging, and microlensing methods. I outline the challenges to synthesizing the demographics using different methods and discuss some preliminary first steps in this direction. Finally, I describe future prospects for providing a nearly complete statistical census of exoplanets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.01715,
  title  = {The Demographics of Wide-Separation Planets},
  author = {B. Scott Gaudi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.01715},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

69 pages, 17 Figures. Review chapter to appear in the Lecture Notes of the 3rd Advanced School on Exoplanetary Science (Editors L. Mancini, K. Biazzo, V. Bozza, A. Sozzetti)