Lecture 4 Flashcards
What was the DARWIN mission?
Darwin was a suggested ESA Cornerstone mission which would have involved a constellation of four to nine spacecraft designed to directly detect Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars and search for evidence of life on these planets. Suggested 1996.
What are the three major difficulties of direct detection of nearby (<25pc) earths?
Contrast: 10^7 in the infrared for a Sun-Earth system; > 10^9-10 in the visual
Angular Separation: 0.1 arcsec for a Sun-Earth system at 10pc
Spectrum: 1 photon m^-2 μ^-1 s^-1
What kind of instrument was DARWIN?
A space interferometer.
What was the CoRoT mission?
A very precise photometer that can measure changes in stellar flux to an accuracy better than 1ppm. It was supposed to search for planets similar to earth and to study the inner parts of stars by measuring light changes in output caused by acoustical sound waves. It discovered the first planet from space, first super earth with measured mass and radius and first non-inflated transiting Jupiter.
What was the KEPLER mission?
A space telescope designed to survey a portion of the milky was galaxy in search of exoplanets. It identified more that 2800 candidates and 116 confirmed planets. (4706 and 1039 today)
What three properties are needed for the scaling relations for stellar mass and radius?
Frequency of maximum power of oscillations (Acoustical wave oscillations).
Large frequency separation between consecutive overtones.
Effective temperature.
Why was KEPLER’s result relevant to planet parameters?
Because with the help of astroseismology and keplers results, exoplanet parameters are now known to <5% instead of <50%. Better precision of stellar parameters -> better precision of exoplanet parameters.
What was the CHEOPS mission?=
Cheops is ESA’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite. It is the first mission dedicated to studying bright, nearby stars that are already known to host exoplanets, in order to make high-precision observations of the planet’s size as it passes in front of its host star(Transit).
What was the TESS mission?
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope for NASA’s Explorers program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission. It will also look at brighter stars than Kepler did.
What was the PLATO mission?
The PLATO mission goal is to detect and study exoplanets; especially terrestrial planets around solar-like stars. This is done via the transit method and astroseismology. The result will be a catalogue with planetary parameters for nearby exoplanets.
What parameters of the exoplanets did the PLATO mission cover?
radii (transit) masses (RV follow-up) mean densities ages (astroseismology) well-known host stars Albedo
