Observing Strategies for the Detection of Jupiter Analogs

TL;DR

This paper investigates optimal observing strategies for detecting Jupiter-like exoplanets using radial-velocity data, emphasizing the importance of observation count over extended time coverage for reliable detection.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of observational campaign design, revealing that increasing the number of observations improves detection more than extending observation duration.

Findings

Detection probability scales with the square root of the number of observations.

No noise floor observed; detection improves with more data up to N=500.

Longer time coverage becomes less effective once the orbital period is detectable.

Abstract

To understand the frequency, and thus the formation and evolution, of planetary systems like our own solar system, it is critical to detect Jupiter-like planets in Jupiter-like orbits. For long-term radial-velocity monitoring, it is useful to estimate the observational effort required to reliably detect such objects, particularly in light of severe competition for limited telescope time. We perform detailed simulations of observational campaigns, maximizing the realism of the sampling of a set of simulated observations. We then compute the detection limits for each campaign to quantify the effect of increasing the number of observational epochs and varying their time coverage. We show that once there is sufficient time baseline to detect a given orbital period, it becomes less effective to add further time coverage -- rather, the detectability of a planet scales roughly as the square root of the number of observations, independently of the number of orbital cycles included in the data string. We also show that no noise floor is reached, with a continuing improvement in detectability at the maximum number of observations N=500 tested here.