The Ariel Target List: The Impact of TESS and the Potential for Characterising Multiple Planets Within a System

TL;DR

This paper assesses the potential of the Ariel mission to characterize exoplanets, especially multiple planets within systems, using TESS data to ensure a robust target list for understanding planet formation and evolution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that TESS provides a sufficient and diverse target sample for Ariel and explores Ariel's capability to characterize multiple planets in a single system for the first time.

Findings

TESS will provide over a thousand potential targets for Ariel.

Ariel can effectively characterize multiple planets within the same system.

The target list from TESS is sufficient for statistical and comparative planetology studies.

Abstract

The ESA Ariel mission has been adopted for launch in 2029 and will conduct a survey of around one thousand exoplanetary atmospheres during its primary mission life. By providing homogeneous datasets, with a high SNR and wide wavelength coverage, Ariel will unveil the atmospheric demographics of these far-away worlds, helping to constrain planet formation and evolution processes on a galactic scale. Ariel seeks to undertake a statistical survey of a diverse population of planets and, therefore, the sample of planets from which this selection can be made is of the utmost importance. While many suitable targets have already been found, hundreds more will be discovered before the mission is operational. Previous studies have used predictions of exoplanet detections to forecast the available planet population by the launch date of Ariel, with the most recent noting that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) alone should provide over a thousand potential targets. In this work, we consider the planet candidates found to date by TESS to show that, with the addition of already confirmed planets, Ariel will already have a more than sufficient sample to choose its target list from once these candidates are validated. We showcase the breadth of this population as well as exploring, for the first time, the ability of Ariel to characterise multiple planets within a single system. Comparative planetology of worlds orbiting the same star, as well as across the wider population, will undoubtedly revolutionise our understanding of planet formation and evolution.