Determining What Makes a Planet Earth-like

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The proposed program centers around the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets, with a goal to find planets that may be similar to the Earth and to learn what properties make a planet Earth-like. Taking a big picture view, this program is one small step towards learning if we are alone in the Universe. Canadian scientists have played a key role in the discovery of the first planets around distant stars and Canada has made significant investments in future infrastructure to further Canada's strength in exoplanetary science. The first investment is a spectrograph built for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that will launch in 2018. The spectrograph, named NIRISS has the ability to detect and characterization extrasolar planets that may be similar to the Earth. However, JWST needs to know where to look. The primary goal of the proposed program is to find, characterize and prioritize the extrasolar planets that are being discovered via the transit method. An exoplanet transit occurs when a exoplanet passes in front of its host star from our point-of-view. The transit makes the host star appear fainter as some light is blocked. The characteristics of the loss of light observed can be modeled to estimate the size and temperature of the planet. The requested funding will aid in finding and characterizing rare transiting events from millions of stars. The discovered planets will be priority targets for JWST in order to determine if other Earth-like planets exist in the Universe.