TY - JOUR
T1 - A framework for prioritizing the TESS planetary candidates most amenable to atmospheric characterization
AU - Kempton, Eliza M.R.
AU - Bean, Jacob L.
AU - Louie, Dana R.
AU - Deming, Drake
AU - Koll, Daniel D.B.
AU - Mansfield, Megan
AU - Christiansen, Jessie L.
AU - López-Morales, Mercedes
AU - Swain, Mark R.
AU - Zellem, Robert T.
AU - Ballard, Sarah
AU - Barclay, Thomas
AU - Barstow, Joanna K.
AU - Batalha, Natasha E.
AU - Beatty, Thomas G.
AU - Berta-Thompson, Zach
AU - Birkby, Jayne
AU - Buchhave, Lars A.
AU - Charbonneau, David
AU - Cowan, Nicolas B.
AU - Crossfield, Ian
AU - De Val-Borro, Miguel
AU - Dragomir, Diana
AU - Heng, Kevin
AU - Hu, Renyu
AU - Kane, Stephen R.
AU - Kreidberg, Laura
AU - Mallonn, Matthias
AU - Morley, Caroline V.
AU - Narita, Norio
AU - Nascimbeni, Valerio
AU - Pallé, Enric
AU - Quintana, Elisa V.
AU - Rauscher, Emily
AU - Seager, Sara
AU - Shkolnik, Evgenya
AU - Sing, David K.
AU - Sozzetti, Alessandro
AU - Stassun, Keivan G.
AU - Essen, Carolina Von
AU - Valenti, Jeff A.
N1 - Funding Information:
The work of E.M.-R.K. was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1654295 and by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement through their Cottrell Scholar program. J.L.B. acknowledges support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and NASA through STScI grants GO-14792 and 14793. D.R.L. acknowledges support from NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF) Program—Grant NNX16AP52H. D. Deming acknowledges support from the TESS mission. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. D.D.B.K. was supported by a James McDon-nell Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. J.K.B. is supported by a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellowship. T.B. and E.V.Q. are grateful for support from GSFC Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC). D.C. acknowledges support from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of John Templeton Foundation. D. Dragomir acknowledges support provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51372.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. N.N. was partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant Number JP18H01265 and JST PRESTO grant Number JPMJPR1775. E.L.S. acknowledges funding from NASA Habitable Worlds grant NNX16AB62G. C.v.E. acknowledges funding for the Stellar Astrophysics Centre, provided by The Danish National Research Foundation (Grant agreement no.: DNRF106).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/11
Y1 - 2018/11
N2 - A key legacy of the recently launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will be to provide the astronomical community with many of the best transiting exoplanet targets for atmospheric characterization. However, time is of the essence to take full advantage of this opportunity. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), although delayed, will still complete its nominal five year mission on a timeline that motivates rapid identification, confirmation, and mass measurement of the top atmospheric characterization targets from TESS. Beyond JWST, future dedicated missions for atmospheric studies such as the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) require the discovery and confirmation of several hundred additional sub-Jovian size planets (Rp<10 R⊕) orbiting bright stars, beyond those known today, to ensure a successful statistical census of exoplanet atmospheres. Groundbased extremely large telescopes (ELTs) will also contribute to surveying the atmospheres of the transiting planets discovered by TESS. Here we present a set of two straightforward analytic metrics, quantifying the expected signal-tonoise in transmission and thermal emission spectroscopy for a given planet, that will allow the top atmospheric characterization targets to be readily identified among the TESS planet candidates. Targets that meet our proposed threshold values for these metrics would be encouraged for rapid follow-up and confirmation via radial velocity mass measurements. Based on the catalog of simulated TESS detections by Sullivan et al., we determine appropriate cutoff values of the metrics, such that the TESS mission will ultimately yield a sample of ∼300 high-quality atmospheric characterization targets across a range of planet size bins, extending down to Earth-size, potentially habitable worlds.
AB - A key legacy of the recently launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will be to provide the astronomical community with many of the best transiting exoplanet targets for atmospheric characterization. However, time is of the essence to take full advantage of this opportunity. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), although delayed, will still complete its nominal five year mission on a timeline that motivates rapid identification, confirmation, and mass measurement of the top atmospheric characterization targets from TESS. Beyond JWST, future dedicated missions for atmospheric studies such as the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) require the discovery and confirmation of several hundred additional sub-Jovian size planets (Rp<10 R⊕) orbiting bright stars, beyond those known today, to ensure a successful statistical census of exoplanet atmospheres. Groundbased extremely large telescopes (ELTs) will also contribute to surveying the atmospheres of the transiting planets discovered by TESS. Here we present a set of two straightforward analytic metrics, quantifying the expected signal-tonoise in transmission and thermal emission spectroscopy for a given planet, that will allow the top atmospheric characterization targets to be readily identified among the TESS planet candidates. Targets that meet our proposed threshold values for these metrics would be encouraged for rapid follow-up and confirmation via radial velocity mass measurements. Based on the catalog of simulated TESS detections by Sullivan et al., we determine appropriate cutoff values of the metrics, such that the TESS mission will ultimately yield a sample of ∼300 high-quality atmospheric characterization targets across a range of planet size bins, extending down to Earth-size, potentially habitable worlds.
KW - Planets and satellites: Atmospheres
KW - planets and satellites: Detection
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85055529226&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85055529226&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1088/1538-3873/aadf6f
DO - 10.1088/1538-3873/aadf6f
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85055529226
SN - 0004-6280
VL - 130
JO - Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
JF - Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
IS - 993
M1 - 114401
ER -