Abstract
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as a forerunner for the detection of the long-awaited Sun-Earth analog system. All the achievements in this field would not have been possible without the constant development of the technology and of new methods to detect more and more challenging planets. After the consolidation of a top-level instrumentation for high-resolution spectroscopy in the visible wavelength range, a huge effort is now dedicated to reaching the same precision and accuracy in the near-infrared. Actually, observations in this range present several advantages in the search for exoplanets around M dwarfs, known to be the most favorable targets to detect possible habitable planets. They are also characterized by intense stellar activity, which hampers planet detection, but its impact on the radial velocity modulation is mitigated in the infrared. Simultaneous observations in the visible and near-infrared ranges appear to be an even more powerful technique since they provide combined and complementary information, also useful for many other exoplanetary science cases.
Highlights
The radial velocity method allowed detecting the first extrasolar planet around a solar-like star, 51 Peg b [1], opening the era of the quest for planets
The radial velocity (RV) technique is an “indirect” method to detect exoplanets since it reveals the reflex motion of the host star due to a hidden companion when both revolve around the common center of mass
The new scientific questions in the framework of the exoplanet search and characterization can be summarized as follow: (i) the search for Earth-mass rocky planets in the habitable zone (HZ) of M dwarfs; (ii) the identification of the origin of planetary system diversity through the detection of planets around young stars; (iii) the characterization of the hot gas giant planets atmospheres as a laboratory for the future characterization of rocky habitable planets with Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) or space-based telescopes
Summary
The radial velocity (or Doppler) method allowed detecting the first extrasolar planet around a solar-like star, 51 Peg b [1], opening the era of the quest for planets. The radial velocity (RV) technique is an “indirect” method to detect exoplanets since it reveals the reflex motion of the host star due to a hidden companion when both revolve around the common center of mass. The periodical variation of the stellar RV, obtained through the measurement of the Doppler shift of its spectral lines, is dependent on the characteristic of its small-mass companion. Just like the shape of the RV variation allows measuring a set of orbital parameters with Equation (1), the same principle is valid for the transit light modulation, which can be modeled by specific functions presented in [2]
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