Report - School of Physics

5 Recommendations
Europe has already established leadership in major areas of the exo-planet field, including
radial velocity (HARPS), transit searches (COROT), and astrometry (Gaia).
The first goal of future actions should be to take full advantage of this situation,
with an offensive policy to optimize the scientific return of instruments already built
or foreseen in the near future [the ongoing or planned ESO instrument programmes
(HARPS, UVES, CRIRES, OmegaTranS, PRIMA, GENIE, Planet Finder, etc.) are
not considered further here].
The second goal is to prepare new initiatives. Suggested directions are:
1. ESA
1.1. Eddington: provide a clearer message to the community about the plans and
schedule for an Eddington-type exo-planetary mission [Section 2.2.1].
1.2. Gaia: recognise that the highest accuracy will supply the most comprehensive
information on low-mass planets in the Solar neighbourhood (down to about 10 M ⊕ ),
thus assisting the identification of targets for Darwin/OWL/PRIMA, and the largest
number of detections, scaling as the third power of the accuracy [Section 2.2.2].
1.3. Darwin: maintain the research and development plan for this key project in
the domain of exo-planet science at high priority, consistent with the current 2015
target launch date, cf. TPF-C launch planned for 2014 [Section 3.2].
1.4. JWST: support the ‘Astrobiology and JWST’ panel recommendations, to ensure
that JWST can follow up low-mass transits discoveries [Section 2.2.4].
1.5. Encourage the community to submit mission proposals covering the important
themes in Section 3.3: e.g. a future transit survey mission significantly more
performant than currently planned; an all-sky transit mission; a UV spectroscopic
mission for transit spectroscopy; astrometric detection of Earth-mass planets out to
20–30 pc, etc. [Section 3.3].
2. ESO
2.1. Support experiments to improve radial velocity mass detection limits, e.g. based
on experience from HARPS, down to those imposed by stellar surface phenomena
[Section 1.3].
2.2. Characterise nearby potential planet host stars, e.g. T eff , log g, [Fe/H], M,
radius, etc. [Section 4.4].
2.3. Improve the capabilities of main-stream VLT instruments for high cadence,
high S/N transit spectroscopy in the visible and infrared [Section 2.1.2].
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