PLATO, the 3rd Medium class ESA’s mission, is being built to detect and characterize extrasolar planets by photometrically monitoring a large number of stars. PLATO will detect small planets around bright stars, including terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. PLATO will also study the (host) stars using asteroseismology, allowing us to determine the stellar properties...
While Gaia DR3 itself contained limited exoplanet results, Gaia DR4 is expected to include the discovery, orbits, and masses of thousands of exoplanets. I will briefly review exoplanet results of Gaia DR3, including from its combination with Hipparcos. I will discuss the reasons for the continued value of Hipparcos measurements in the face of higher Gaia precision, and the scaling of Gaia...
In 2029, the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will shine its first light on the sky. The high angular resolution and large collecting capacity, combined with the extreme sensitivity and versatility of the ELT's instruments, will allow unprecedented observations of worlds orbiting stars other than the Sun. It will provide a unique opportunity to address fundamental questions related to...
One of the primary goals of the astronomical community in the next few decades is to characterize temperate terrestrial exoplanets to search for life. To address this challenge, the US Astro2020 Decadal survey recommended the pursuit of a technical and scientific study for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), an ultraviolet/visible/ near-infrared (UV/VIS/NIR) “high-contrast direct imaging...
A Galactic Census of Exoplanets from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Abstract: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) is NASA’s next major
astrophysics mission, scheduled for launch in late 2026. Roman will feature a wavelength range, aperture, and angular resolution comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope but with approximately 100 times the field of view and 1,000 times the...
With its location from ASTEP (Antarctic Search for Transiting Exoplanets) has been contributing to the discovery of many interacting planetary systems on long periods (tens to hundreds of days). The chopping signal from the planet-planet interactions can yield significant TTVs that can be measured with no ambiguity, allowing constraints on the planetary mass. The extremely small densities of...
Radial velocity (RV) surveys have revealed a rich population of cold Jupiters and Solar System analogues, but the long-standing degeneracy between planet mass and orbital inclination continues to limit what we can infer about their true architectures. The upcoming Gaia Data Release 4 (DR4), expected within the next year, will change that by providing epoch astrometry for more than a billion...
Perhaps the greatest mysteries of gas giant and brown dwarf formation reside at the youngest (few Myr) ages, when such objects are being born in their natal circumstellar disks and the corresponding theoretical models predict an enormous range of luminosities. In practice, this means that any observations of such objects help open a window into the earliest stages, and increasing the current...
The atmospheric characterization of giant exoplanets has so far relied primarily on transit spectroscopy, a technique intrinsically biased toward short-period planets and therefore largely inaccessible for cold, long-period giants. High-contrast imaging (HCI) fills this gap by providing a complementary route to study the atmospheres of wide-orbit giant planets directly. However, conducting...
