Do we Need to Solve the Exozodi Question? If Yes, How to Best Solve It?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of understanding and mitigating exozodiacal dust clouds to improve direct imaging of Earth-like exoplanets, highlighting current challenges and potential solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the exozodi problem and evaluates strategies for addressing the impact of dust clouds on exoplanet imaging.

Findings

Exozodiacal dust significantly hampers direct imaging of exoEarths.

Current methods to detect and characterize exozodis are limited.

Solving the exozodi issue is crucial for future exoplanet missions.

Abstract

When observing an extrasolar planetary system, the most luminous component after the star itself is generally the light scattered and/or thermally emitted by a population of micron-sized dust grains. These grains are expected to be continuously replenished by the collisions and evaporation of larger bodies just as in our solar zodiacal cloud. Exozodiacal clouds ("exozodis") must therefore be seriously taken into account when attempting to directly image faint Earth-like planets (exoEarths, for short). This paper summarizes the oral contributions and discussions that took place during the Satellite Meeting on exozodiacal dust disks, in an attempt to address the following two questions: Do we need to solve the exozodi question? If yes, how to best solve it?