Future Exoplanet Research: Science Questions and How to Address Them

Abstract

Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space missions. These instruments will dramatically improve their performance in terms of photometric precision, detection speed, multipixel imaging, high-resolution spectroscopy, allowing to go much deeper in the knowledge of planets.Here we outline some science questions which should go beyond these standard improvements and how to address them. Our prejudice is that one is never too speculative: experience shows that the speculative predictions initially not accepted by the community have been confirmed several years later (like spectrophotometry of transits or circumbinary planets).

Simulating asteroid impacts and meteor events by high-power lasers: from the laboratory to spaceborne missions

“…A possible future milestone in astronomy is to detect very large meteors and impacts in exoplanetary atmospheres. This will be provided by upcoming spectroscopic studies of exoplanets (Schneider, 2018). However, it has been estimated that an impact of the size of the Chicxulub event, which occurred 65 Mya ago, viewed from 10 light-years away would exhibit an absolute magnitude of 20.9 and be barely detectable even assuming 100% emissivity (Paine, 2006).…”

OWL-Moon: Very high resolution spectropolarimetric interferometry and imaging from the Moon: exoplanets to cosmology

“…The correlation leads to an angular resolution up to λ /L for a wavelength λ and a baseline L. But, to achieve a S/N ratio of 3, the relation (2) shows that it requires a very narrow wave band with a very fast (pico to femto second time resolution) detector and a large number of collected photons to reach a 3 sigma SNR. A large collecting area is thus required.…”

“…In section 3 we review the main logistic issues. In section 4 we provide a, non exhaustive, sometimes nonstandard, panorama of science objectives, in the spirit of [2]. Finally, in section 5 we propose a 1-5 meter telescope as a common precursor of different large projects.…”

OWL-Moon in 2050 and beyond

“…The monitoring of this image would reveal the contours of the continents. Several other future exoplanet science objectives can be found in Schneider [20].…”