Precise measurements of exoplanets radii are of key importance for our understanding of the origin and nature of these objects. Measurement of the planet radii using the transit method have reached a precision that the effects of stellar surface features have to be taken into account. While the effects from spots have already been studied in detail, our knowledge of the effects caused by faculae is still limited. This is particularly the case for M-stars. Faculae can pose a problem if they are inhomogeneously distributed on the stellar surface. Using the eclipse mapping method, we study the distribution of the faculae on the surface of GJ1214 using the CaIIH&K lines as tracers. In order to assess the homogeneity of the distribution in a quantitative way, we introduce the inhomogeneity factor IHF. IHF is 0% if the distribution is homogeneous, positive, if the plage regions are preferentially located along the path of the planet, and negative, if they are preferentially located outside the path of the planet. For GJ1214, we derive a rather small value of IHF=7.7-7.7+12.0%. We discuss the relevance of this result in the context of the PLATO and ARIEL missions.
Surfaces of the Sun and other cool stars are filled with magnetic fields, which are either seen as dark compact spots or more diffuse bright structures like faculae. Both hamper detection and characterisation of exoplanets, affecting stellar brightness and spectra, as well as transmission spectra. However, the expected facular and spot signals in stellar data are quite different, for instance they have distinct temporal and spectral profiles. Consequently, corrections of stellar data for magnetic activity can greatly benefit from the insight on whether the stellar signal is dominated by spots …
The reliable characterization of planetary atmospheres with transmission spectroscopy requires realistic modeling of stellar magnetic features, since features that are attributable to an exoplanet atmosphere could instead stem from the host star's magnetic activity. Current retrieval algorithms for analysing transmission spectra rely on intensity contrasts of magnetic features from 1D radiative-convective models. However, magnetic features, especially faculae, are not fully captured by such simplified models. Here we investigate how well such 1D models can reproduce 3D facular contrasts, takin…
We present a ground-based optical transmission spectrum for the warm Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-110b from two transit observations made with the FOcal Reducer and Spectrograph (FORS2) on the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The spectrum covers the wavelength range from 4000 to 8333Å, which is binned in 46 transit depths measured to an averaged precision of 220 parts per million (ppm) over an averaged 80Å~bin for a Vmag=12.8 star. The measured transit depths are unaffected by a dilution from a close A-type field dwarf, which was fully resolved. The overall main characteristic of the transmission spe…
Where does the simplified Stellar Contamination Model fail in Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy?
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Center for Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics Mackenzie (CRAAM), Mackenzie Presbyterian University（麦肯锡长老会大学射电天体物理学中心）
Infrared Flares from M Dwarfs: a Hinderance to Future Transiting Exoplanet Studies
许多当前和未来的系外行星任务正在推动红外（IR）波长，行星和恒星之间的通量对比更有利（Deming et al. 2009），恒星磁活动的影响减少。事实上，最近对恒星黑子和光斑的分析发现，这些形式的恒星活动不会对具有JWST的FGKM恒星的凌日特征或科学潜力产生实质性影响（Zellem et al. 2017）。然而，在耀斑的情况下，这是不正确的，我证明这可能是一个障碍，过境研究在这份说明。
From an observational standpoint, stellar activity poses a critical challenge to exoplanet science, as it inhibits the detection of planets and the precise measurement of their parameters. Radial velocity and transit searches revealed a significant fraction of exoplanet hosts is active, and showed the need to fully understand the different facets of stellar activity and its impact on observables. Moreover, the activity correction is of prime importance for the detection and characterisation of Earth analogues. We present a review of the effects that stellar activity features such as starspots,…
Technological advances in instrumentation have led to an exponential increase in exoplanet detection and scrutiny of stellar features such as spots and faculae. While the spots and faculae enable us to understand the stellar dynamics, exoplanets provide us with a glimpse into stellar evolution. While the ubiquity of noise (e.g., telluric, instrumental, or photonic) is unavoidable, combining this with increased spectrographic resolution compounds technological challenges. To account for these noise sources and resolution issues, we use a temporal multifractal framework to study data from the SO…
Stellar rotation periods can be determined by observing brightness variations caused by active magnetic regions transiting visible stellar disk as the star rotates. The successful stellar photometric surveys stemming from the Kepler and TESS observations led to the determination of rotation periods in tens of thousands of young and active stars. However, there is still a lack of information about rotation periods of older and less active stars, like the Sun. The irregular temporal profiles of light curves caused by the decay times of active regions, which are comparable to or even shorter than…
Towards Extremely Precise Radial Velocities: I. Simulated Solar Spectra for Testing Exoplanet Detection Algorithms
最近和即将推出的稳定光谱仪正在推动多普勒光谱学的前沿，以检测和表征低质量行星。这些仪器的规格是如此令人印象深刻，以至于恒星的固有变化预计会限制它们对大多数目标恒星的多普勒精度（Fischer et al. 2016）。为了充分发挥它们的潜力，天文学家必须开发新的策略来区分真实的多普勒频移和恒星的内在变化。由于恒星黑子、光斑和其他与旋转相关的变化，恒星的变化特别令人担忧，因为恒星的旋转周期通常包括在潜在的行星轨道周期范围内。为了通过多普勒行星调查稳健地探测和准确地描述低质量行星的特征，系外行星界必须开发能够联合建模行星扰动和恒星固有变化的统计模型。为了实现这一目标，本文介绍了用SOAP 2.0（arXiv：1409.3594）创建的极高分辨率的太阳光谱的模拟，其中包括多个不断变化的恒星斑点。我们预计这组数据将有助于未来的研究开发，测试和比较统计方法测量物理径向速度之间的污染恒星的变化。
The Fe I 4377 Å Line as a Solar Faculae Indicator: Insights from Spectral Ratio Analysis
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；University of Graz（格拉茨大学）；Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP)（波茨坦阿波罗尼乌斯天体物理研究所）；Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung（马克斯·普朗克太阳系统研究所）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所）；University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）
该研究利用光谱比分析（SRA）结合HARPS-N观测，发现Fe I 4377埃线可可靠指示太阳耀斑，其填充因子与SDO测量值吻合，有助于减轻恒星活动对系外行星径向速度测量的影响。
Transmission spectra of exoplanets orbiting active stars suffer from wavelength-dependent effects due to stellar photospheric heterogeneity. WASP-19b, an ultra-hot Jupiter (T$_{eq}$ $\sim$ 2100 K), is one such strongly irradiated gas-giant orbiting an active solar-type star. We present optical (520-900 nm) transmission spectra of WASP-19b obtained across eight epochs using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini-South telescope. We apply our recently developed Gaussian Processes regression based method to model the transit light curve systematics and extract the transmission …
Deciphering transmission spectra by exploring the solar paradigm
Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (ICE, CSIC)（空间科学研究所）；Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC)（加泰罗尼亚太空研究所）；Institut für Physik, Universität Graz（格拉茨大学物理研究所）；Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung（马普太阳系研究所）
Transmission spectroscopy of the inflated exoplanet WASP-52b, and evidence for a bright region on the stellar surface
我们用安装在4.2米威廉·赫歇尔望远镜上的ULTRACAM仪器，在SDSS u '，g'和以钠偶线（NaI）为中心的滤光片上同时进行测光观测，测量了极度膨胀的热木星WASP-52 b的透射光谱。我们发现，瑞利散射是不透明的行星大气内的主要来源，并找到一个传输光谱更一致的波长无关的不透明性，如从云。我们检测到的过境异常，我们归因于恒星活动的存在，并发现这一功能可以更简单地模拟为一个明亮的区域在恒星表面类似太阳光斑，而不是斑点。一个斑点模型需要一个显着更大的行星/恒星半径比发现在以前的研究。我们的研究结果突出的精度，可以实现地面测光误差小于一个大气尺度的高度，可比的HST观测的缩放行星半径。
Pandora is a SmallSat mission designed to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, and was selected as part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers Program. Transmission spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets provides our best opportunity to identify the makeup of planetary atmospheres in the coming decade. Stellar brightness variations due to star spots, however, can impact these measurements and contaminate the observed spectra. Pandora's goal is to disentangle star and planet signals in transmission spectra to reliably determine exoplanet atmosphere compositions. Pandora will collect long-duration photo…
Study Analysis Group 21 (SAG21) of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) was organized to study the effect of stellar contamination on space-based transmission spectroscopy, a method for studying exoplanetary atmospheres by measuring the wavelength-dependent radius of a planet as it transits its star. Transmission spectroscopy relies on a precise understanding of the spectrum of the star being occulted. However, stars are not homogeneous, constant light sources but have temporally evolving photospheres and chromospheres with inhomogeneities like spots, faculae, plages, g…
Radial velocity (RV) searches for Earth-mass exoplanets in the habitable zone around Sun-like stars are limited by the effects of stellar variability on the host star. In particular, suppression of convective blueshift and brightness inhomogeneities due to photospheric faculae/plage and starspots are the dominant contribution to the variability of such stellar RVs. Gaussian process (GP) regression is a powerful tool for statistically modeling these quasi-periodic variations. We investigate the limits of this technique using 800 days of RVs from the solar telescope on the High Accuracy Radial v…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Université de Genève（日内瓦大学）；Observatoire de Genève（日内瓦天文台）；University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）；Facebook（脸书）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；DTU Space, National Space Institute（丹麦技术大学国家空间研究所）
Exoplanet detection with precise radial velocity (RV) observations is currently limited by spurious RV signals introduced by stellar activity. We show that machine learning techniques such as linear regression and neural networks can effectively remove the activity signals (due to starspots/faculae) from RV observations. Previous efforts focused on carefully filtering out activity signals in time using modeling techniques like Gaussian Process regression (e.g. Haywood et al. 2014). Instead, we systematically remove activity signals using only changes to the average shape of spectral lines, and…
Transiting exoplanets orbiting active stars frequently occult starspots and faculae on the visible stellar disc. Such occultations are often rejected from spectrophotometric transits, as it is assumed they do not contain relevant information for the study of exoplanet atmopsheres. However, they can provide useful constraints to retrieve the temperature of active features and their effect on transmission spectra. We analyse the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope in the determination of the spectra of occulted starspots, despite its lack of optical wavelength instruments on board. Fo…
The Third Option: Color Phase Curves to Characterize the Atmospheres of Temperate Rocky Exoplanets
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；SETI Institute（搜寻地外文明研究所）；Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie（马克斯·普朗克天文学研究所）；NASA Goddard Space Flight Center（美国宇航局戈达德太空飞行中心）；Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics（莱布尼茨天体物理研究所）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；JHU Applied Physics Laboratory（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室）；Department of Astronomy and Astrobiology Program, University of Washington（华盛顿大学天文系与天体生物学项目）；Leiden Observatory, Leiden University（莱顿大学莱顿天文台）
Ariel has been selected as the next ESA M4 science mission and it is expected to be launched in 2028. During its 4-year mission, Ariel will observe the atmospheres of a large and diversified population of transiting exoplanets. A key factor for the achievement of the scientific goal of Ariel is the selection strategy for the definition of the input target list. A meaningful choice of the targets requires an accurate knowledge of the planet hosting star properties and this is necessary to be obtained well before the launch. In this work, we present the results of a bench-marking analysis betwee…
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal（毛拉纳·阿扎德国立技术学院，博帕尔）
We are at a unique timeline in the history of human evolution where we may be able to discover earth-like planets around stars outside our solar system where conditions can support life or even find evidence of life on those planets. With the launch of several satellites in recent years by NASA, ESA, and other major space agencies, an ample amount of datasets are at our disposal which can be utilized to train machine learning models that can automate the arduous tasks of exoplanet detection, its identification, and habitability determination. Automating these tasks can save a considerable amou…
The properties of inhomogeneities on the surface of active stars (i.e. dark spots and bright faculae) significantly influence the determination of the parameters of an exoplanet. The chromatic effect they have on transmission spectroscopy could affect the analysis of data from future space missions such as JWST and Ariel. To quantify and mitigate the effects of those surface phenomena, we developed a modelling approach to derive the surface distribution and properties of active regions by modelling simultaneous multi-wavelength time-series observables. By using the StarSim code, now featuring …
A Uniform Determination of the Bulk Metallicities and Alpha Enrichments of Confirmed Exoplanet Systems with TRES
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian（天体物理学中心 | 哈佛与史密森尼学会）；Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院卡弗里天体物理与空间研究所）
Exoplanet characterization is one of the main foci of current exoplanetary science. For super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, we mostly rely on mass and radius measurements, which allow to derive the body's mean density and give a rough estimate of the planet's bulk composition. However, the determination of planetary interiors is a very challenging task. In addition to the uncertainty in the observed fundamental parameters, theoretical models are limited due to the degeneracy in determining the planetary composition. We aim to study several aspects that affect internal characterization of super-Eart…
We have investigated the information content in reflected-starlight spectra of exoplanets. We specify our analysis to Barnard's Star b candidate super-Earth, for which we assume a radius 0.6 times that of Neptune, an atmosphere dominated by H$_2$-He, and a CH$_4$ volume mixing ratio of 5$\cdot$10$^{-3}$. The main conclusions of our study are however planet-independent. We set up a model of the exoplanet described by seven parameters including its radius, atmospheric methane abundance and basic properties of a cloud layer. We generate synthetic spectra at zero phase (full disk illumination) fro…
