A roadmap for the atmospheric characterization of terrestrial exoplanets with JWST
- Creators
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de Wit, Julien
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Doyon, René
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Rackham, Benjamin V.
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Lim, Olivia
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Ducrot, Elsa
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Kreidberg, Laura
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Benneke, Björn
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Ribas, Ignasi
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Berardo, David
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Niraula, Prajwal
- Iyer, Aishwarya
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Shapiro, Alexander
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Kostogryz, Nadiia
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Witzke, Veronika
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Gillon, Michaël
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Agol, Eric
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Meadows, Victoria
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Burgasser, Adam J.
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Owen, James E.
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Fortney, Jonathan J.
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Selsis, Franck
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Bello-Arufe, Aaron
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de Beurs, Zoë
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Bolmont, Emeline
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Cowan, Nicolas
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Dong, Chuanfei
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Drake, Jeremy J.
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Garcia, Lionel
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Greene, Thomas
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Haworth, Thomas
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Hu, Renyu
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Kane, Stephen R.
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Kervella, Pierre
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Koll, Daniel
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Krissansen-Totton, Joshua
- Lagage, Pierre-Olivier
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Lichtenberg, Tim
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Lustig-Yaeger, Jacob
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Lingam, Manasvi
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Turbet, Martin
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Seager, Sara
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Barkaoui, Khalid
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Bell, Taylor J.
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Burdanov, Artem
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Cadieux, Charles
- Charnay, Benjamin
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Cloutier, Ryan
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Cook, Neil J.
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Correia, Alexandre C. M.
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Dang, Lisa
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Daylan, Tansu
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Delrez, Laetitia
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Edwards, Billy
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Fauchez, Thomas J.
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Flagg, Laura
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Fraschetti, Federico
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Haqq-Misra, Jacob
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Huang, Ziyu
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Iro, Nicolas
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Jayawardhana, Ray
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Jehin, Emmanuel
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Jin, Meng
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Kite, Edwin
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Kitzmann, Daniel
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Kral, Quentin
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Lafrenière, David
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Libert, Anne-Sophie
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Liu, Beibei
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Mohanty, Subhanjoy
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Morris, Brett M.
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Murray, Catriona A.
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Piaulet, Caroline
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Pozuelos, Francisco J.
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Radica, Michael
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Ranjan, Sukrit
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Rathcke, Alexander
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Roy, Pierre-Alexis
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Schwieterman, Edward W.
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Turner, Jake D.
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Triaud, Amaury
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Way, Michael J.
- TRAPPIST-1 JWST Community Initiative
Abstract
Ultracool dwarf stars are abundant, long-lived and uniquely suited to enable the atmospheric study of transiting terrestrial companions with the JWST. Among them, the most prominent is the M8.5V star TRAPPIST-1 and its seven planets. While JWST Cycle 1 observations have started to yield preliminary insights into the planets, they have also revealed that their atmospheric exploration requires a better understanding of their host star. Here we propose a roadmap to characterize the TRAPPIST-1 system — and others like it — in an efficient and robust manner with JWST. We notably recommend that — although more challenging to schedule — multi-transit windows be prioritized to mitigate the effects of stellar activity and gather up to twice more transits per JWST hour spent. We conclude that, for such systems, planets cannot be studied in isolation by small programmes but rather need large-scale, joint space- and ground-based initiatives to fully exploit the capabilities of JWST for the exploration of terrestrial planets.
Copyright and License
© Springer Nature Limited 2024. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
Contributions
These authors contributed equally: Julien de Wit, René Doyon.
J.d.W. and R.D. led this community-supported project. B.V.R. led the production of the figures together with J.d.W., R.D., O.L., B.B., P.N., D.B. and Z.d.B. E.D. and L.K. led the discussions associated with emission studies. I.R. led the discussions associated with complementary ground-based studies. A.I., A.S., N.K. and V.W. led the discussions related to stellar models. All authors discussed the topics in the paper, contributed to the writing and commented on the paper at all stages.
Data Availability
The data shown in Fig. 1b are drawn from the NASA Exoplanet Archive (accessed 29 June 2023). The transit timings behind the histogram in Fig. 5a and the suite of selected multi-transit windows in Fig. 5b are obtained from ref. 43. All data used to create the figures are publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/11388689.
Code Availability
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interests.