Future Exoplanet Research: Science Questions and How to Address Them

TL;DR

This paper discusses future directions in exoplanet research, emphasizing the importance of advanced telescopes and missions to answer key scientific questions beyond current capabilities.

Contribution

It outlines new scientific questions for exoplanetology and proposes approaches to address them using upcoming technological advancements.

Findings

Enhanced telescope capabilities will deepen understanding of exoplanets.

Speculative ideas can lead to confirmed breakthroughs in the future.

Future missions will enable more detailed characterization of planetary systems.

Abstract

Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space missions. These instruments will dramatically improve their performance in terms of photometric precision, detection speed, multipixel imaging, high-resolution spectroscopy, allowing to go much deeper in the knowledge of planets. Here we outline some science questions which should go beyond these standard improvements and how to address them. Our prejudice is that one is never too speculative: experience shows that the speculative predictions initially not accepted by the community have been confirmed several years later (like spectrophotometry of transits or circumbinary planets).