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Register a new userThe impact of Gaia and LSST on binary stars and exo-planets
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Two upcoming large scale surveys, the ESA Gaia and LSST projects, will bring a new era in astronomy. The number of binary systems that will be observed and detected by these projects is enormous, estimations range from millions for Gaia to several tens of millions for LSST. We review some tools that should be developed and also what can be gained from these missions on the subject of binaries and exoplanets from the astrometry, photometry, radial velocity and their alert systems.
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On the 19th of December 2013, the Gaia spacecraft was successfully launched by a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana and started its amazing journey to map and characterise one billion celestial objects with its one billion pixel camera. In this presentation, we briefly review the general aims of the mission and describe what has happened since launch, including the Ecliptic Pole scanning mode. We also focus especially on binary stars, starting with some basic observational aspects, and then turning to the remarkable harvest that Gaia is expected to yield for these objects.
Priorities in exo-planet research are rapidly moving from finding planets to characterizing their physical properties. Of key importance is their chemical composition, which feeds back into our understanding of planet formation. For the foreseeable future, far-ultraviolet spectroscopy of white dwarfs accreting planetary debris remains the only way to directly and accurately measure the bulk abundances of exo-planetary bodies. The exploitation of this method is limited by the sensitivity of HST, and significant progress will require a large-aperture space telescope with a high-throughput ultraviolet spectrograph.
We discuss the synergy of Gaia and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in the context of Milky Way studies. LSST can be thought of as Gaias deep complement because the two surveys will deliver trigonometric parallax, proper-motion, and photometric measurements with similar uncertainties at Gaias faint end at $r=20$, and LSST will extend these measurements to a limit about five magnitudes fainter. We also point out that users of Gaia data will have developed data analysis skills required to benefit from LSST data, and provide detailed information about how international participants can join LSST.
Planets are observed to orbit the component star(s) of stellar binary systems on so-called circumprimary or circumsecondary orbits, as well as around the entire binary system on so-called circumbinary orbits. Depending on the orbital parameters of the binary system a planet will be dynamically stable if it orbits within some critical separation of the semimajor axis in the circumprimary case, or beyond some critical separation for the circumbinary case. We present N-body simulations of star-forming regions that contain populations of primordial binaries to determine the fraction of binary systems that can host stable planets at various semimajor axes, and how this fraction of stable systems evolves over time. Dynamical encounters in star-forming regions can alter the orbits of some binary systems, which can induce long-term dynamical instabilities in the planetary system and can even change the size of the habitable zone(s) of the component stars. However, the overall fraction of binaries that can host stable planetary systems is not greatly affected by either the assumed binary population, or the density of the star-forming region. Instead, the critical factor in determining how many stable planetary systems exist in the Galaxy is the stellar binary fraction - the more stars that are born as singles in stellar nurseries, the higher the fraction of stable planetary systems.
We present empirical measurements of the radii of 116 stars that host transiting planets. These radii are determined using only direct observables-the bolometric flux at Earth, the effective temperature, and the parallax provided by the Gaia first data release-and thus are virtually model independent, extinction being the only free parameter. We also determine each stars mass using our newly determined radius and the stellar density, itself a virtually model independent quantity from previously published transit analyses. These stellar radii and masses are in turn used to redetermine the transiting planet radii and masses, again using only direct observables. The median uncertainties on the stellar radii and masses are ~8% and ~30%, respectively, and the resulting uncertainties on the planet radii and masses are ~9% and ~22%, respectively. These accuracies are generally larger than previously published model-dependent precisions of ~5% and ~6% on the planet radii and masses, respectively, but the newly determined values are purely empirical. We additionally report radii for 242 stars hosting radial-velocity (non-transiting) planets, with median achieved accuracy of ~2%. Using our empirical stellar masses we verify that the majority of putative retired A stars in the sample are indeed more massive than ~1.2 Msun. Most importantly, the bolometric fluxes and angular radii reported here for a total of 498 planet host stars-with median accuracies of 1.7% and 1.8%, respectively-serve as a fundamental dataset to permit the re-determination of transiting planet radii and masses with the Gaia second data release to ~3% and ~5% accuracy, better than currently published precisions, and determined in an entirely empirical fashion.
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