An educated search for transiting habitable planets. Targetting M dwarfs with known transiting planets
M. Gillon (1,2), X. Bonfils (2,3), B.-O. Demory (4,2), S. Seager (4),, D. Deming (5), A.H.M.J. Triaud (2) ((1) University of Liege, Belgium, (2), Geneva Observatory, Switzerland, (3) University Joseph-Fourier, Grenoble,, France, (4) MIT, Boston, USA, (5) NASA/Goddard SFC

TL;DR
This paper explores the potential of high-precision photometric monitoring of M dwarf GJ 1214 to detect transiting habitable planets, emphasizing the feasibility of ground and space-based observations for small planets.
Contribution
It demonstrates that GJ 1214 is a promising target for detecting small transiting habitable planets using photometry, with detailed probability analysis and simulations.
Findings
Ground-based monitoring can detect Earth-sized habitable planets.
Space-based monitoring can detect Mars-sized habitable planets.
Mass measurement of small planets remains challenging with current technology.
Abstract
Because the planets of a system form in a flattened disk, they are expected to share similar orbital inclinations at the end of their formation. The high-precision photometric monitoring of stars known to host a transiting planet could thus reveal the transits of one or more other planets. We investigate here the potential of this approach for the M dwarf GJ 1214 that hosts a transiting super-Earth. For this system, we infer the transit probabilities as a function of orbital periods. Using Monte-Carlo simulations we address both the cases for fully coplanar and for non-coplanar orbits, with three different choices of inclinations distribution for the non-coplanar case. GJ 1214 reveals to be a very promising target for the considered approach. Because of its small size, a ground-based photometric monitoring of this star could detect the transit of a habitable planet as small as the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsStellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Astro and Planetary Science · Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing
