Predictions of Planet Detections with Near-infrared Radial Velocities in the Upcoming SPIRou Legacy Survey-planet Search
Abstract
The SPIRou near-infrared spectropolarimeter is destined to begin science operations at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in mid-2018. One of the instrument’s primary science goals is to discover the closest exoplanets to the solar system by conducting a three- to five-year long radial velocity survey of nearby M dwarfs at an expected precision of ∼1 m s-1, the SPIRou Legacy Survey-Planet Search (SLS-PS). In this study, we conduct a detailed Monte Carlo simulation of the SLS-PS using our current understanding of the occurrence rate of M dwarf planetary systems and physical models of stellar activity. From simultaneous modeling of planetary signals and activity, we predict the population of planets to be detected in the SLS-PS. With our fiducial survey strategy and expected instrument performance over a nominal survey length of ∼3 years, we expect SPIRou to detect {85.3}-12.4+29.3 planets including {20.0}-7.2+16.8 habitable-zone planets and {8.1}-3.2+7.6 Earth-like planets from a sample of 100 M1-M8.5 dwarfs out to 11 pc. By studying mid-to-late M dwarfs previously inaccessible to existing optical velocimeters, SPIRou will put meaningful constraints on the occurrence rate of planets around those stars including the value of {η }\oplus at an expected level of precision of ≲ 45 % . We also predict that a subset of {46.7}-6.0+16.0 planets may be accessible with dedicated high-contrast imagers on the next generation of extremely large telescopes including {4.9}-2.0+4.7 potentially imagable Earth-like planets. Lastly, we compare the results of our fiducial survey strategy to other foreseeable survey versions to quantify which strategy is optimized to reach the SLS-PS science goals. The results of our simulations are made available to the community on GitHub (https://github.com/r-cloutier/SLSPS_Simulations).
- Publication:
-
The Astronomical Journal
- Pub Date:
- February 2018
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-3881/aaa54e
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1712.06673
- Bibcode:
- 2018AJ....155...93C
- Keywords:
-
- methods: statistical;
- planets and satellites: detection;
- planets and satellites: general;
- stars: low-mass;
- techniques: radial velocities;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Accepted for publication in AJ. 19 figures including 15 interactive figures when viewed in Adobe Acrobat. Simulation results provided at https://github.com/r-cloutier/SLSPS_Simulations