Detecting and sizing the Earth with PLATO: A feasibility study based on solar data

TL;DR

This study assesses how solar-like variability impacts PLATO's ability to detect and characterize Earth-like exoplanets, demonstrating that short-term variability can be mitigated and that bright targets allow reliable detection and sizing.

Contribution

It provides a feasibility analysis of detecting Earth analogs with PLATO by modeling solar variability and testing detection and sizing methods on real solar data.

Findings

Short-term solar variability affects transit detection.

Variability models with ~1 hour timescales mitigate effects.

Bright targets enable reliable detection and sizing.

Abstract

Context. The PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission will observe the same area of the sky continuously for at least two years in an effort to detect transit signals of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar-like star. Aims. We aim to study how short-term solar-like variability caused by oscillations and granulation would affect PLATO's ability to detect and size Earth if PLATO were to observe the Solar System itself. Methods. We injected Earth-like transit signals onto real solar data taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument. We isolated short-term stellar variability by removing any variability with characteristic timescales longer than five hours. We then added a noise model for a variety of different stellar magnitudes computed by PlatoSim assuming an observation by all 24 normal cameras. We first compared four different commonly used treatments of correlated noise in the time domain. We then tried to recover pairs of transit signals. Finally, we performed transit fits using realistic priors on planetary and stellar parameters. Results. We find that short-term solar-like variability affects the correct retrieval of Earth-like transit signals in PLATO data. Variability models accounting for variations with typical timescales at the order of one hour are sufficient to mitigate these effects. For bright targets (8.5 - 10.5 mag), the transit signal of an Earth analogue can reliably be detected in PLATO data. For faint targets the results of transit search algorithms have to be verified by transit-fitting algorithms to avoid false positive detections being flagged. For bright targets (V-mag $\leq$ 9.5), the radius of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar-like star can be correctly determined at a precision of 3% or less, assuming that at least two transit events are observed and the characteristics of the host star are well understood.