LRP2020: The Opportunity of Young Nearby Associations with the Advent of the Gaia Mission

TL;DR

This white paper highlights the potential for Canada to lead in stellar association and exoplanet research by leveraging Gaia data and Canadian spectroscopic facilities, fostering scientific advancement and personnel training.

Contribution

It proposes a strategic plan for Canada to utilize Gaia data and existing facilities to advance research in stellar associations and exoplanets, establishing leadership and training opportunities.

Findings

Gaia data has revolutionized stellar kinematics with precise measurements for 1.3 billion stars.

Over 900 new young low-mass stars have been identified, some hosting exoplanets.

Canadian facilities can rapidly characterize these stars and their exoplanets, enhancing research capabilities.

Abstract

This white paper proposes leveraging high-quality Gaia data available to the worldwide scientific community and complement it with support from Canadian-related facilities to place Canada as a leader in the fields of stellar associations and exoplanet science, and to train Canadian highly qualified personnel through graduate and post-graduate research grants. Gaia has sparked a new era in the study of stellar kinematics by measuring precise distances and proper motions for 1.3 billion stars. These data have already generated more than 1700 scientific papers and are guaranteed to remain the source of many more papers for the upcoming decades. More than 900 new age-calibrated young low-mass stars have already been discovered as a direct consequence of the second Gaia data release. Some of these may already be host stars to known exoplanet systems or may become so with the progress of the TESS mission that is expected to discover 10,000 nearby transiting exoplanets in the upcoming decade. This places Canada in a strategic position to leverage Gaia data because it has access to several high-resolution spectrometers on 1-4 m class telescopes (e.g. The ESPaDOnS, SPIRou and NIRPS), that would allow to quickly characterize this large number of low-mass stars and their exoplanet systems. This white paper describes the opportunity in such scientific projects that could place Canada as a leader in the fields of stellar associations and exoplanets.