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Register a new userThe NASA High-Resolution Speckle Interferometric Imaging Program: Validation and Characterization of Exoplanets and Their Stellar Hosts
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Starting in 2008, NASA has provided the exoplanet community an observational program aimed at obtaining the highest resolution imaging available as part of its mission to validate and characterize exoplanets, as well as their stellar environments, in search of life in the universe. Our current program uses speckle interferometry in the optical (320-1000 nm) with new instruments on the 3.5-m WIYN and both 8-m Gemini telescopes. Starting with Kepler and K2 follow-up, we now support TESS and other space- and ground-based exoplanet related discovery and characterization projects. The importance of high-resolution imaging for exoplanet research comes via identification of nearby stellar companions that can dilute the transit signal and confound derived exoplanet and stellar parameters. Our observations therefore provide crucial information allowing accurate planet and stellar properties to be determined. Our community program obtains high-resolution imagery, reduces the data, and provides all final data products, without any exclusive use period, to the community via the Exoplanet Follow-Up Observation Program (ExoFOP) website maintained by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. This paper describes the need for high-resolution imaging and gives details of the speckle imaging program, highlighting some of the major scientific discoveries made along the way.
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High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure planet radius or mass. Our future understanding of directly imaged exoplanets will therefore rely on extrapolated models of planetary atmospheres and bulk composition, which need robust calibration. We estimate the population of extrasolar planets that could serve as calibrators for these models. Critically, this population of standard planets must be accessible to both direct imaging and the transit method, allowing for radius measurement. We show that the search volume of a direct imaging mission eventually overcomes the transit probability falloff with semi-major axis, so that as long as cold planets are not exceedingly rare, the population of transiting planets and directly imageable planets overlaps. Using current extrapolations of Kepler occurrence rates, we estimate that ~8 standard planets could be characterized shortward of 800 nm with an ambitious future direct imaging mission like LUVOIR-A and several dozen could be detected at V band. We show the design space that would expand the sample size and discuss the extent to which ground- and space-based surveys could detect this small but crucial population of planets.
We present an auto-differentiable spectral modeling of exoplanets and brown dwarfs. This model enables a fully Bayesian inference of the high-dispersion data to fit the ab initio line-by-line spectral computation to the observed spectrum by combining it with the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in recent probabilistic programming languages. An open source code, exojax, developed in this study, was written in Python using the GPU/TPU compatible package for automatic differentiation and accelerated linear algebra, JAX (Bradbury et al. 2018). We validated the model by comparing it with existing opacity calculators and a radiative transfer code and found reasonable agreements of the output. As a demonstration, we analyzed the high-dispersion spectrum of a nearby brown dwarf, Luhman 16 A and found that a model including water, carbon monoxide, and $mathrm{H_2/He}$ collision induced absorption was well fitted to the observed spectrum ($R=10^5$ and $2.28-2.30 mumathrm{m}$). As a result, we found that $T_0 = 1295 pm 14 mathrm{K}$ at 1 bar and $mathrm{C/O} = 0.62 pm 0.01$, which is slightly higher than the solar value. This work demonstrates the potential of full Bayesian analysis of brown dwarfs and exoplanets as observed by high-dispersion spectrographs and also directly-imaged exoplanets as observed by high-dispersion coronagraphy.
We present new UV-to-IR stellar photometry of four low-extinction windows in the Galactic bulge, obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Using our five bandpasses, we have defined reddening-free photometric indices sensitive to stellar effective temperature and metallicity. We find that the bulge populations resemble those formed via classical dissipative collapse: each field is dominated by an old (~10 Gyr) population exhibiting a wide metallicity range (-1.5 < [Fe/H] < 0.5). We detect a metallicity gradient in the bulge population, with the fraction of stars at super-solar metallicities dropping from 41% to 35% over distances from the Galactic center ranging from 0.3 to 1.2 kpc. One field includes candidate exoplanet hosts discovered in the SWEEPS HST transit survey. Our measurements for 11 of these hosts demonstrate that exoplanets in the distinct bulge environment are preferentially found around high-metallicity stars, as in the solar neighborhood, supporting the view that planets form more readily in metal-rich environments.
In the near future, extremely-large ground-based telescopes may conduct some of the first searches for life beyond the solar system. High-spectral resolution observations of reflected light from nearby exoplanetary atmospheres could be used to search for the biosignature oxygen. However, while Earths abundant O$_2$is photosynthetic, early ocean loss may also produce high atmospheric O$_2$ via water vapor photolysis and subsequent hydrogen escape. To explore how to use spectra to discriminate between these two oxygen sources, we generate high-resolution line-by-line synthetic spectra of both a habitable Earth-like, and post-ocean-loss Proxima Centauri b. We examine the strength and profile of four bands of O$_2$ from 0.63 to 1.27 $mu$m, and quantify their relative detectability. We find that 10 bar O$_2$ post-ocean-loss atmospheres have strong suppression of oxygen bands, and especially the 1.27$mu$m band. This suppression is due to additional strong, broad O$_2$-O$_2$ collisionally-induced absorption (CIA) generated in these more massive O$_2$atmospheres, which is not present for the smaller amounts of oxygen generated by photosynthesis. Consequently, any detection of the 1.27$mu$m band in reflected light indicates lower Earth-like O$_2$ levels, which suggests a likely photosynthetic origin. However, the 0.69 $mu$m O$_2$ band is relatively unaffected by O$_2$-O$_2$ CIA, and the presence of an ocean-loss high-O$_2$ atmosphere could be inferred via detection of a strong 0.69 $mu$m O$_2$ band, and a weaker or undetected 1.27 $mu$m band. These results provide a strategy for observing and interpreting O$_2$ in exoplanet atmospheres, that could be considered by future ground-based telescopes.
The formation and dynamical history of hot Jupiters is currently debated, with wide stellar binaries having been suggested as a potential formation pathway. Additionally, contaminating light from both binary companions and unassociated stars can significantly bias the results of planet characterisation studies, but can be corrected for if the properties of the contaminating star are known. We search for binary companions to known transiting exoplanet host stars, in order to determine the multiplicity properties of hot Jupiter host stars. We also characterise unassociated stars along the line of sight, allowing photometric and spectroscopic observations of the planetary system to be corrected for contaminating light. We analyse lucky imaging observations of 97 Southern hemisphere exoplanet host stars, using the Two Colour Instrument on the Danish 1.54m telescope. For each detected companion star, we determine flux ratios relative to the planet host star in two passbands, and measure the relative position of the companion. The probability of each companion being physically associated was determined using our two-colour photometry. A catalogue of close companion stars is presented, including flux ratios, position measurements, and estimated companion star temperature. For companions that are potential binary companions, we review archival and catalogue data for further evidence. For WASP-77AB and WASP-85AB, we combine our data with historical measurements to determine the binary orbits, showing them to be moderately eccentric and inclined to the line of sight and planetary orbital axis. Combining our survey with the similar Friends of Hot Jupiters survey, we conclude that known hot Jupiter host stars show a deficit of high mass stellar companions compared to the field star population; however, this may be a result of the biases in detection and target selection by ground-based surveys.
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