Vol 20, No 3

Searching for exoplanets by HEPS II. detecting earth-like planets in habitable zone around planet hosts within 30 pc

Zhou-Yi Yu, Hui-Gen Liu, Ji-Lin Zhou, En-Si Liang, Ming Yang, Hui Zhang, Jia-Cheng Liu

Abstract

Abstract HEPS (Habitable ExoPlanet Survey) is a planning astrometry satellite that aims to find Earth-like planets in the solar neighbourhood. In this paper, we selected 140 planet harboring stars within 30 pc of the solar system to be potential targets for HEPS. We calculate the detection probability of the planet in habitable zone (HZ) for each system using the simulated data of astrometry measurements. For those host stars without planets in HZ, we inject an additional planet of 10 M⊕ in their HZs and check the stability of the systems. Considering five observation modes of different sampling cadence and total observation time, we obtain a table containing the total detection probability of the planets in HZs for all of the 140 selected systems. This paper provides a potential ranked list of target stars for HEPS, or other astrometric mission to detect Earth-like planets in the future. We also calculate an empirical fitted expression of the detection probability as a function of both sampling cadence and total observation time. We conclude a quantitative method to estimate the detection probability for certain planet hosts and observation modes via the empirical expression. We show the minimum requirements of both sampling cadence and observation time for Proxima Centauri, HD 189733 and HD 102365, if the detection probability of habitable-zone planets of these three systems needs to be 90%.

Keywords

Keywords astrometry — stars: planetary systems — planets and satellites: detection — methods: numerical

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