The crucial role of ground-based, Doppler measurements for the future of exoplanet science

Jason H. Steffen (1), Peter Plavchan (2), Timothy Brown (3), Eric B. Ford (4), Andrew W. Howard (5), Hannah Jang-Condell (6), David W. Latham (7), Jack J. Lissauer (8), Benjamin E. Nelson (9), Patrick Newman (2), Darin Ragozzine (10) ((1) University of Nevada, Las Vegas, (2) George Mason University, (3) Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, (4) The Pennsylvania State University, (5) California Institute of Technology, (6) University of Wyoming, (7) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, (8) NASA Ames Research Center, (9) Northwestern University, (10) Brigham Young University)
(Submitted on 16 Mar 2018)

We outline the important role that ground-based, Doppler monitoring of exoplanetary systems will play in advancing our theories of planet formation and dynamical evolution. A census of planetary systems requires a well designed survey to be executed over the course of a decade or longer. A coordinated survey to monitor several thousand targets each at ~1000 epochs (~3-5 million new observations) will require roughly 40 dedicated spectrographs. We advocate for improvements in data management, data sharing, analysis techniques, and software testing, as well as possible changes to the funding structures for exoplanet science.

Comments:    White Paper submitted to NAS Exoplanet Strategy Committee
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1803.06057 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1803.06057v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jason Steffen
[v1] Fri, 16 Mar 2018 02:24:08 GMT (171kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06057