X-ray Studies of Exoplanets: A 2020 Decadal Survey White Paper
Abstract
Over the last two decades, the discovery of exoplanets has fundamentally changed our perception of the universe and humanity's place within it. Recent work indicates that a solar system's X-ray and high energy particle environment is of fundamental importance to the formation and development of the atmospheres of close-in planets such as hot Jupiters, and Earth-like planets around M stars. X-ray imaging and spectroscopy provide powerful and unique windows into the high energy flux that an exoplanet experiences, and X-ray photons also serve as proxies for potentially transfigurative coronal mass ejections. Finally, if the host star is a bright enough X-ray source, transit measurements akin to those in the optical and infrared are possible and allow for direct characterization of the upper atmospheres of exoplanets. In this brief white paper, we discuss contributions to the study of exoplanets and their environs which can be made by X-ray data of increasingly high quality that are achievable in the next 10--15 years.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.04320,
title = {X-ray Studies of Exoplanets: A 2020 Decadal Survey White Paper},
author = {Scott J. Wolk and Jeremy J. Drake and Graziella Branduardi-Raymont and Katja Poppenhaeger and Vladimir Airapetian and Kevin France and Salvatore Sciortino and Ignazio Pillitteri and Rachel A. Osten and Carey M. Lisse and Vinay Kashyap and Brad Wargelin and Brian Wood and Willaim Dunn and David Principe and Moritz Günther and Damian J. Christian and Julian David Alvarado-Gomez and Chuanfei Dong and Lidia Oskinova and Margarita Karovska and Sofia P. Moschou and Peter K. Williams and Randall Smith and Bradford Snios and Elena Gallo and William Danchi and John P. Pye and Joel Kastner and Jose Dias Do Nascimento and Jae-Sub Hong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.04320},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
7 pages with 2 figures. A 2020 Decadal Survey White Paper