The Next Great Exoplanet Hunt
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The Next Great Exoplanet Hunt Kevin Heng University of Bern, Physics Institute, Center for Space and Habitability, Sidlerstrasse 5, CH-3012, Bern, Switzerland Joshua Winn Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, United States of America Abstract What strange new worlds will our next-generation telescopes find? Kevin Heng is an assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Bern, Switzerland (Twitter: @KevinHeng1). He is a core science team member of the CHEOPS mission and is involved in the PLATO mission. Joshua Winn is associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a member of the Kepler science team, and is currently deputy science director of the TESS mission. Edited by Katie Burke. www.americanscientist.org One of the most stunning scientific advances of our gen- ships to visit the exoplanet itself, these atmospheric characteri- eration has been the discovery of planets around distant stars. zations seem the most promising—and to some, the only—way Fewer than three decades ago, astronomers could only specu- of discerning whether a given exoplanet is actually inhabited. late on the probability for a star to host a system of exoplanets. Molecular oxygen, or ozone, for example, would be circum- Now we know the Universe is teeming with exoplanets, many stantial, but not definitive, evidence for life, because there are of which have properties quite unlike the planets of our Solar plausible ways of producing it abiotically using the known laws System. This has given birth to the new field of exoplanetary of physics and chemistry. Subsurface life may exist on an ex- science, one of the most active areas of astronomy, pursued by oplanet, but we probably have no chance of detecting it with many research groups around the world. astronomical observations. Although there are many ways of detecting exoplanets, the This logical sequence of exploration is largely mirrored in most successful in recent years has been the transit method, in the series of space missions that NASA and the European Space which the exoplanet reveals itself by transiting (passing directly Agency (ESA) have planned, approved, and constructed—or in front of) its host star, causing a miniature eclipse. These will construct. Exoplanet detection is poised to make the tran- eclipses are detected by telescopes that are capable of precisely sition from cottage industry to big science, while atmospheric tracking the brightnesses of many stars at the same time. Since characterization is inexorably finding its feet. its launch in 2009, NASA’s Kepler space telescope used this technique to resounding effect, finding more than 1,000 con- Bright, Twinkling Stars firmed transiting exoplanets. The success of the Kepler mission Early efforts to detect transiting exoplanets in the early 2000s has inspired the next generation of exoplanet transit-hunting used ground-based telescopes, which face daunting obstacles. machines: a fleet of new space telescopes and complementary One obstacle is the annoying tendency of the Sun to rise ev- ground-based telescopes. They will expand our inventory of ery morning. This foils the attempt to monitor stars as con- strange new worlds and further our quest to find Earth-like ex- tinuously as possible. Transits that occur during daytime are arXiv:1504.04017v2 [astro-ph.EP] 30 Jun 2015 oplanets and search them for signs of life. missed. Another obstacle is the Earth’s atmosphere, a turbulent The long-term strategy of exoplanet hunting is easy to state: and constantly varying screen that causes apparent fluctuations find exoplanets, characterize their atmospheres and, ultimately, in starlight much stronger than the transit signals we seek to search for chemical signatures of life (biomarkers). These ef- detect. Even on a seemingly clear night, the atmosphere alters forts strive to answer questions such as: Which molecules are the passage of starlight in a manner that depends on both wave- the most abundant? What is the typical cloud coverage, tem- length and brightness, through the phenomena of extinction and perature and wind speed? Is there a solid surface beneath all scintillation. Extinction is why the setting sun is red and dim; the gas? The answers to these questions help establish whether scintillation is why stars twinkle. To correct for these effects, an exoplanet is potentially habitable. And unless we can detect astronomers point their telescopes at groups of stars with simi- radio broadcasts from an intelligent civilization or build star- lar colors and brightness, trusting that the atmosphere will affect them all equally—whereas a transiting exoplanet would cause only one of them to temporarily dim. Using these reference Corresponding authors: [email protected] (Kevin Heng), [email protected] (Joshua Winn) stars, exoplanet transits can be flagged and confirmed. Published in American Scientist: Volume 103, Number 3, Pages 196–203 (May-June 2015 Issue) August 14, 2018 Heng & Winn: The Next Great Exoplanet Hunt (in American Scientist) 2 probability for transits is equal to the stellar diameter divided by 1.002 the orbital diameter, which is only 0.1% for an Earth-like orbit 1.000 around a Sun-like star. For this reason, a meaningful transit sur- vey must include tens of thousands of stars, or more. Because 0.998 faint stars far outnumber bright ones in any given region of the sky, a practical strategy is to monitor a rich field of relatively 0.996 Ground−based Relative brightness 1.2m telescope (FLWO) faint stars. This is precisely what the Kepler space telescope did, staring at about 150,000 stars in a small, 115-square-degree 1.002 patch of sky in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. Unfortu- 1.000 nately, most of the Kepler discoveries involve stars that are too faint for the atmospheric characterization of their exoplanets. 0.998 Transiting exoplanets offer the potential for atmospheric char- 0.996 Space−based acterization. During a transit, a small portion of the starlight is Relative brightness 1.0m telescope (Kepler) filtered through the exoplanet’s atmosphere. By comparing the 0 2 4 6 8 spectrum of starlight during a transit to the starlight just before Time [hours] or after the transit, we can identify absorption features due to atoms and molecules in the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Another approach is to measure the light emitted from the exoplanet, by Figure 1: Why we need space telescopes to observe transiting exoplanets. The top panel shows a time series of brightness measurements of the exoplanet detecting the drop in brightness when the exoplanet is hidden HAT-P-11b, using an Arizona-based telescope with a 1.2-meter diameter. The behind the star, an event known as an “occultation”. dip of 0.4%, lasting a few hours, is due to the miniature eclipse of the star by an The practical value of transits and occultations depends crit- exoplanet a shade larger than Neptune. The large scatter in the measurements is due to failure to correct adequately for atmospheric effects and the interruption ically on the brightness of the star. The higher the rate of pho- just after the transit is due to morning twilight. The bottom panel shows an tons (particles of light) that a star delivers to Earth, the faster observation of the same exoplanet with the 1.0-meter Kepler space telescope. we can accumulate information about its exoplanets. This is Despite being a smaller telescope, the absence of atmospheric effects and the because many astronomical observations are limited by photon- uninterrupted observations enable a vastly improved view of the transit. It is even possible to tell that the exoplanet crossed over a dark spot on the surface counting noise. The greater the number of photons we collect, of the star (known as a “star spot”), based on the slight upward flicker that was the smaller the effects of shot noise and the higher the signal- seen in the second half of the transit (at a time coordinate of about 4.5 hours). to-noise ratio. This in turn allows us to search for smaller exo- planets, which produce smaller transit signals. To put the small- ness in perspective, an Earth-sized exoplanet transiting a Sun- From our vantage point on Earth, bright stars are rarer than like star produces a total dimming of only 84 parts per million faint ones, simply because of geometry—casting our net far- and its atmospheric signal would be smaller by at least an or- ther into space would create a celestial sphere that encompasses der of magnitude. To measure the spectrum of an exoplanetary more stars, which tend to be fainter on average because of the atmosphere, one needs to divide up the starlight according to greater distances involved. The brightest stars are distributed wavelength. In essence, a small signal must be split into even uniformly across the entire sky and are therefore widely sepa- smaller ones, an endeavour only feasible if the signal-to-noise rated in angle. Finding reference stars to confirm an exoplanet ratio is very high at the outset. And this is only possible for transit becomes harder for bright stars: the only comparable bright stars. The Kepler stars are typically more than a million reference stars may be located so far away on the sky that one times fainter than the brightest naked-eye stars such as Sirius, can no longer assume they are affected equally by the atmo- Vega and Alpha Centauri. sphere. This helps to explain the otherwise paradoxical fact These challenges are easier to overcome when the exoplanet that the “best and brightest” few thousand stars in the sky are is large, is located close to its star and has a “light” (low mean relatively unexplored for transiting exoplanets.