Exoplanetary atmosphere target selection in the era of comparative planetology
arXiv:1802.05645 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stz783
Abstract
The large number of new planets expected from wide-area transit surveys means that follow-up transmission spectroscopy studies of their atmospheres will be limited by the availability of telescope assets. We argue that telescopes covering a broad range of apertures will be required, with even 1m-class instruments providing a potentially important contribution. Survey strategies that employ automated target selection will enable robust population studies. As part of such a strategy, we propose a decision metric to pair the best target to the most suitable telescope, and demonstrate its effectiveness even when only primary transit observables are available. Transmission spectroscopy target selection need not therefore be impeded by the bottle-neck of requiring prior follow-up observations to determine the planet mass. The decision metric can be easily deployed within a distributed heterogeneous network of telescopes equipped to undertake either broadband photometry or spectroscopy. We show how the metric can be used either to optimise the observing strategy for a given telescope (e.g. choice of filter) or to enable the selection of the best telescope to optimise the overall sample size. Our decision metric can also provide the basis for a selection function to help evaluate the statistical completeness of follow-up transmission spectroscopy datasets. Finally, we validate our metric by comparing its ranked set of targets against lists of planets that have had their atmospheres successfully probed, and against some existing prioritised exoplanet lists.
arXiv comment20 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables. Revision 3, accepted by MNRAS. Improvements include always using planetary masses where available and reliable, treatment for sky backgrounds and out-of-transit noise and a use case for defocused photometry
References in corpus (34)
- Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1
- The PLATO 2.0 Mission
- A continuum from clear to cloudy hot-Jupiter exoplanets without primordial water depletion
- A Framework for Prioritizing the TESS Planetary Candidates Most Amenable to Atmospheric Characterization
- Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets. IV. Thirty systems with space-based light curves
- ELODIE metallicity-biased search for transiting Hot Jupiters II. A very hot Jupiter transiting the bright K star HD189733
- Helium in the eroding atmosphere of an exoplanet
- A Framework for Characterizing the Atmospheres of Low-Mass Low-Density Transiting Planets
- Line-profile tomography of exoplanet transits -- II. A gas-giant planet transiting a rapidly-rotating A5 star
- The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS)
- A Super-Earth Transiting a Naked-Eye Star
- A giant planet undergoing extreme ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host
- Detection of titanium oxide in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter
- The changing phases of extrasolar planet CoRoT-1b
- Detection of Thermal Emission from a Super-Earth
- The long egress of GJ~436b's giant exosphere
- Three irradiated and bloated hot Jupiters: WASP-76b, WASP-82b & WASP-90b
- A library of ATMO forward model transmission spectra for hot Jupiter exoplanets
- Water, High-Altitude Condensates, and Possible Methane Depletion in the Atmosphere of the Warm Super-Neptune WASP-107b
- Transiting Exoplanet Studies and Community Targets for JWST's Early Release Science Program
- NGTS-1b: A hot Jupiter transiting an M-dwarf
- The GTC exoplanet transit spectroscopy survey IX. Detection of Haze, Na, K, and Li in the super-Neptune WASP-127b
- A HST/WFC3 Thermal Emission Spectrum of the Hot Jupiter HAT-P-7b
- Atmospheric Scintillation in Astronomical Photometry
- MOST detects transits of HD 97658b, a warm, likely volatile-rich super-Earth
- Statistical Analysis of Hubble/WFC3 Transit Spectroscopy of Extrasolar Planets
- ULTRASPEC: a high-speed imaging photometer on the 2.4-m Thai National Telescope
- The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS)
- MuSCAT2: four-color Simultaneous Camera for the 1.52-m Telescopio Carlos Sánchez
- From dense hot Jupiter to low-density Neptune: The discovery of WASP-127b, WASP-136b and WASP-138b
- Transit timing variation and transmission spectroscopy analyses of the hot Neptune GJ3470b
- Hubble PanCET: An isothermal day-side atmosphere for the bloated gas-giant HAT-P-32Ab
- A feature-rich transmission spectrum for WASP-127b
- WASP-86b and WASP-102b: super-dense versus bloated planets
Cited by in corpus (7)
- A Framework for Prioritizing the TESS Planetary Candidates Most Amenable to Atmospheric Characterization
- Utilizing Small Telescopes Operated by Citizen Scientists for Transiting Exoplanet Follow-up
- Optimizing exoplanet atmosphere retrieval using unsupervised machine-learning classification
- Constraining Exoplanet Metallicities and Aerosols with ARIEL: An Independent Study by the Contribution to ARIEL Spectroscopy of Exoplanets (CASE) Team
- Reflected Light Phase Curves in the TESS Era
- Engaging Citizen Scientists to Keep Transit Times Fresh and Ensure the Efficient Use of Transiting Exoplanet Characterization Missions
- Mutual detectability: a targeted SETI strategy that avoids the SETI Paradox