Simulations for Planning Next-Generation Exoplanet Radial Velocity Surveys

TL;DR

This paper presents a simulation framework for planning next-generation radial velocity surveys to optimize the detection of Earth-like exoplanets, supporting future direct imaging missions like HabEx and LUVOIR.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive simulation framework for designing and comparing radial velocity survey architectures to enhance exoplanet detection for upcoming direct imaging missions.

Findings

All surveyed architectures achieve the minimum detection sensitivity for Earth-mass habitable zone planets.

Simulated surveys can generate sufficient observations to account for stellar activity and correlated noise.

Framework helps optimize survey design for maximum exoplanet yield.

Abstract

Future direct imaging missions such as HabEx and LUVOIR aim to catalog and characterize Earth-mass analogs around nearby stars. The exoplanet yield of these missions will be dependent on the frequency of Earth-like planets, and potentially the a priori knowledge of which stars specifically host suitable planetary systems. Ground or space based radial velocity surveys can potentially perform the pre-selection of targets and assist in the optimization of observation times, as opposed to an uninformed direct imaging survey. In this paper, we present our framework for simulating future radial velocity surveys of nearby stars in support of direct imaging missions. We generate lists of exposure times, observation time-series, and radial velocity time-series given a direct imaging target list. We generate simulated surveys for a proposed set of telescopes and precise radial velocity spectrographs spanning a set of plausible global-network architectures that may be considered for next generation extremely precise radial velocity surveys. We also develop figures of merit for observation frequency and planet detection sensitivity, and compare these across architectures. From these, we draw conclusions, given our stated assumptions and caveats, to optimize the yield of future radial velocity surveys in support of direct imaging missions. We find that all of our considered surveys obtain sufficient numbers of precise observations to meet the minimum theoretical white noise detection sensitivity for Earth-mass habitable zone planets, with margin to explore systematic effects due to stellar activity and correlated noise.