Space Sciences/Astrophysics Seminar with Howard Isaacson on Ground-based Radial Velocity Surveys as the Foundation for Future Space Missions

The California Planet Search has conducted a precise radial velocity of ~700 nearby stars in the solar neighborhood spanning dozens of years, and a high-resolution spectroscopy survey of 1,000 planet hosting stars. The California Legacy Survey (CLS) and California Kepler Survey (CKS) were conducted as an exploratory survey and a characterization survey, respectively. Together, they have provided measurements of the occurrence rates of massive planets out to 10s of astronomical units and (with the help of NASA's Kepler Mission) a census of the planet radius distribution down to one Earth radius. The success of future space missions such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will require knowing the occurrence of Earth-sized planets, and Jupiter-like planets. Understanding the stellar noise sources required to achieve 10 cm/s RV precision will be required for constraining the masses of planets that are targeted for future imaging and spectroscopy surveys including Roman, Ariel and HWO.  Orbital architectures of systems like our own can be best understood through RV monitoring. Fully characterizing planetary systems containing inner sub-Neptunes and super-Earths, together or without Jupiter analogs, will rely on the critical knowledge we have obtained using ground-based resources of the last 25 years.

Sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.