Gaia planet discovery space

A. Sozzetti and colleagues have evaluated how Gaia observations of nearby stars (d < 25pc) will contribute to the database of stars to be observed by the ESA/NASA Darwin/TPF when it is launched in the middle of the next decade.

Gaia's primary contributions to the population of the Darwin target database will be:

• confirmation of the existence of Jupiter signposts from radial velocity measurements;
• extension of spectroscopic surveys to late K through M dwarfs, complementing ground-based observations;
• providing estimates of the planet mass, thus contributing to models establishing whether or not dynamical interactions would permit an Earth-like planet to form in the habitable zone;
• measuring the inclination of the orbital plane, complementing ground-based studies of exo-zodiacal cloud emission for the extra-solar system. (Potential targets with edge-on orbital inclination will be excluded from the target list.)

The image above shows the Gaia planet discovery space as a function of orbital radius, stellar spectral type and distance from the observer (green solid line: 5 pc; green dashed-dotted line: 25 pc). The blue dashed line represents the habitable zone of the star. The pink dashed line indicates the planet discovery space for 3 m/s precision radial velocity measurements.

The Gaia Astrometric Survey of the Solar Neighbourhood and its Contribution to the Target Database for Darwin/TPF, A. Sozetti et al., will appear in Proceedings of the Conference 'Toward Other Earths: DARWIN/TPF and the Search for Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets' to be published as ESA SP-359.

Image courtesy of A. Sozzetti

[Published: 17/11/2003]