Determining What Makes a Planet Earth-like

拟议中的计划围绕太阳系外行星的发现和表征展开，目标是寻找可能与地球相似的行星，并了解行星的哪些属性使其与地球相似。从大的角度来看，这个项目是学习宇宙中我们是否孤独的一小步。加拿大科学家在发现第一批围绕遥远恒星的行星方面发挥了关键作用，加拿大在未来的基础设施方面进行了重大投资，以进一步增强加拿大在系外行星科学方面的实力。第一笔投资是为詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜(JWST)建造的光谱仪，该望远镜将于2018年发射。这台名为NIRISS的光谱仪有能力探测和描述可能与地球相似的太阳系外行星。然而，JWST需要知道去哪里寻找。拟议计划的主要目标是寻找、描述和确定通过凌日方法发现的太阳系外行星的优先顺序。从我们的角度来看，当一颗系外行星从其主星前面经过时，就会发生系外行星凌日。由于一些光线被遮挡，凌日使主星显得暗淡。可以对观测到的光损失的特征进行建模，以估计行星的大小和温度。申请的资金将帮助寻找和描述来自数百万恒星的罕见凌日事件。被发现的行星将是JWST的优先目标，以确定宇宙中是否存在其他类似地球的行星。

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.