Exploring the link between star and planet formation with Ariel

Abstract

The goal of the Ariel space mission is to observe a large and diversified population of transiting planets around a range of host star types to collect information on their atmospheric composition. The planetary bulk and atmospheric compositions bear the marks of the way the planets formed: Ariel's observations will therefore provide an unprecedented wealth of data to advance our understanding of planet formation in our Galaxy. A number of environmental and evolutionary factors, however, can affect the final atmospheric composition. Here we provide a concise overview of which factors and effects of the star and planet formation processes can shape the atmospheric compositions that will be observed by Ariel, and highlight how Ariel's characteristics make this mission optimally suited to address this very complex problem.

Detailed chemical compositions of planet-hosting stars: II. Exploration of the interiors of terrestrial-type exoplanets

“…Exercised with caution, such an analysis (with a yet-large uncertainty) nevertheless offers an insight, in terms what we can learn already with the available data (essentially host stellar composition as well as planetary mass and radius) and with the bulk/interior models (with sensibly simplifications) that we can build, into the detailed properties of habitable-zone, terrestrial-type exoplanets, thus providing guidance for the target selections for future missions, such as PLATO (Rauer et al 2014;Nascimbeni et al 2022), Ariel (Turrini et al 2021), and LIFE (Quanz et al 2021(Quanz et al , 2022.…”

Ariel stellar characterisation

“…This allows us to analyse planetary systems born under different conditions from each other (see Carrillo et al 2020;Bashi & Zucker 2022) and evolved in different stellar environments. Furthermore, it will allow to study the effects on both their planetary architectures and the composition of their planets (Turrini et al 2021a).…”

“…Yet, the observational methodology of Ariel is based on differential spectroscopy that measures planetary signals of 10 -50 ppm relative to the star, which entails the scientific importance of precisely characterising all host stars' properties beforehand. Besides, it is likewise essential to establish a robust and bias-free stellar reference frame on which to build our knowledge on exo-atmospheres and planetary formation processes (Turrini et al 2021a). This translates into using the same uniform methodology for the analysis of all Tier 1 stars, and into making sure that the full set of parameters for each star is self-consistent (Danielski et al 2021).…”