The European Space Agency will launch PLATO, an exoplanet-hunting mission that will scan over 245,000 stars for possible Earth-like planets.
“First, we needed a synthetic population of planets . To do this, we took a planetary population model, which is basically a simulation of 1000 protoplanetary discs evolving into planetary systems . Since the resulting systems are quite different from what we currently know about exoplanets, we wanted to include data from Kepler.
“That is the basic function of PYPE,” said Matuszewski. “From there, we can tweak the program to give us results for various false scenarios and time periods. How many planets do we find looking here for two years and there for two years? What if we look at a particular field for longer?” The scientists found that PLATO is likely to detect thousands or tens of thousands of exoplanets and that a statistically significant number of these planets are likely to be similar to Earth.
“Using the most conservative planet population model and mission scenario, we estimate a minimum of 500 Earth-sized planets to be detected in the nominal mission duration of 4 years. That includes every type of star and every distance to the star. If we look at Earth-sized planets with an orbital period range of 250-500 days around G stars , we estimate up to 12 detections. This is for the 2+2 year observation with the most optimistic planet model,” Matuszewski explained.
Ultimately, this study aims to tackle the long-standing questions and the important margin of uncertainty relating to how common certain types of planets are. This will offer scientists a better idea of how common exoplanets are, particularly ones that are habitable and perhaps even inhabited.
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