Centauri Dreams

What great news that ESPRESSO, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, has just achieved ‘first light.’ The spectrograph is installed on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile and its powers are prodigious. For ESPRESSO makes it possible, for the first time, to combine the light of all four telescopes at the VLT. This creates an instrument with the light collecting power of a 16-meter telescope, a major enhancement to the exoplanet hunt.

Image: The room where the light beams coming from the four VLT Unit Telescopes are brought together and fed into fibres, which in turn deliver the light to the spectrograph itself in another room. One of the points where the light enters the room appears at the back of this picture. Credit: ESO/P. Horálek.

Thus the enthusiasm of lead scientist Francesco Pepe (University of Geneva):

ESPRESSO isn’t just the evolution of our previous instruments like HARPS, but it will be transformational, with its higher resolution and higher precision. And unlike earlier instruments it can exploit the VLT’s full collecting power — it can be used with all four of the VLT Unit Telescopes at the same time to simulate a 16-metre telescope. ESPRESSO will be unsurpassed for at least a decade — now I am just impatient to find our first rocky planet!”

Image: This colorful image shows spectral data from the First Light of the ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The light from a star has been dispersed into its component colours. This view has been colourised to indicate how the wavelengths change across the image, but these are not exactly the colours that would be seen visually. Close inspection shows many dark spectral lines in the stellar spectra and also the regular double spots from a calibration light source. The dark gaps are features of how the data is taken, and are not real. Credit: ESO/ESPRESSO team.

We’re going to be hearing a lot from ESPRESSO because it will greatly improve our powers of radial velocity observation. Remember what we are doing when we use these techniques. Radial velocity involves extracting the tiny Doppler signature of star motion as the star is pulled first one way, then another, by the planets around it. Compared to the size of the star, the movements are small but we can trace them in the star’s light spectrum.

Repeating changes to the spectrum as it shifts toward red, toward blue, back toward red, give us the data we need to identify a planet, and until the Kepler mission came along, radial velocity was the primary means we used to find such worlds. 51 Pegasi’s planet, the first found to orbit a main-sequence star, was found using radial velocity methods in 1995. Now we use a mixture of methods including transit studies, direct imaging and gravitational microlensing.

Image: The Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) successfully made its first observations in November 2017. Installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, ESPRESSO will search for exoplanets with unprecedented precision by looking at the minuscule changes in the properties of light coming from their host stars. This view shows the inside of one of the ESPRESSO front-ends where all the active components of the spectrograph are located. Credit: Giorgio Calderone, INAF Trieste.

Combining methods can be hugely useful, for while radial velocity lets us measure the mass and orbit of the planet (I won’t, for the purposes of this post, get into the problem that RV mass measurements can produce only minimum mass estimates), transits can help us deduce its density. But for those planets that do not transit, we’d like to move further and further down the scale, making detections of ever smaller worlds, terrestrial-class planets perhaps like our own.

Image: the moment of first light, with the team jubilant in the VLT control room. Credit: Giorgio Calderone, INAF Trieste.

From an ESO fact sheet on ESPRESSO:

The radial velocity technique has been so far the most productive in terms of extra-solar planet detections. Low mass planets (one to few Earth masses) are especially interesting because according to formation models they could represent the bulk of the planet population. However they are more elusive and require extremely stable instruments. The HARPS instrument, with a precision better than 1m/s, has discovered up to now the vast majority of planets with masses smaller than Neptune, giving an invaluable experience in view of the realization of more precise instruments. With a radial velocity precision better than 10cm/s, an Earth mass planet in the habitable zone of a low mass star can be detected.

Exactly so. ESPRESSO picks up where HARPS left off. While HARPS could achieve a precision of one meter per second, ESPRESSO gets us down below 10 centimeters per second. The upscaling is the result of ESPRESSO’s placement to tap the four VLT telescopes as well as advances in spectroscopic technology. The benefit will be in characterizing much less massive planets unavailable for our scrutiny through transits or direct imaging, further bulking up the exoplanet catalog and deepening our statistical analysis of planets near us in the galaxy.

Why all the fuss about red dwarf planets? We’re seeing so much ongoing work on these worlds because when it comes to terrestrial-class planets — in size, at least — those around red dwarfs are going to be our first targets for atmospheric characterization. A ‘habitable zone’ planet around a red dwarf throws a deep transit signature — small star, big planet — so that we can use transit spectroscopy to puzzle out atmospheric components. Getting an actual image would be even better, and modifications to the VISIR instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope, a project Breakthrough Initiatives is involved in along with the ESO, could eventually yield such.

We’ll know a great deal more about the possibilities as new missions come online, but for now, researchers are doing their best to apply models to what we know and deduce what surface conditions may be like around stars like TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri. Some of these results are not auspicious if it’s life we’re looking for. I’m looking at two papers from Chuanfei Dong (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory/Princeton University) that assess potential habitability, and in both cases there are significant reasons to question its likelihood.

Image: Princeton’s Chuanfei Dong. Credit: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

The assumption here is that an atmosphere must exist for long timescales to allow habitable conditions on the surface, and those long time-frames are precisely what is in question. Published earlier this year in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the first of these papers develops models of the stellar wind, that outflow of charged particles that, in our own Solar System, defines the heliosphere around our Sun. This paper deals with the situation at Proxima Centauri b. The second paper, not yet published but available as a preprint, extends the study to the TRAPPIST-1 system, with results that are equally challenging for life.

While we have tended to focus habitability studies on factors like surface temperature (and this, in turn, is much dependent on atmosphere), Dong and colleagues are concerned about the effects of the stellar wind and atmosphere retention. Their simulations, performed using magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) modeling that was originally developed for Venus and Mars, allow them to compute ion escape losses that would be expected at Proxima Centauri b.

Specifically, the Proxima paper examines the electromagnetic erosion of the atmosphere given the photo-chemical effects of the stellar wind, finding that the stellar inflow can ionize atoms in the planetary atmosphere, allowing these electromagnetic forces to sweep them into space. The result: Potentially severe atmospheric loss that would deplete the atmosphere of evaporated water, a cycle that could eventually leave the planetary surface dry.

A sufficiently high stellar wind pressure could cause extensive atmospheric loss, making any surface-based life that emerged a short-lived phenomenon. Says Dong:

“The evolution of life takes billions of years. Our results indicate that Proxima Centauri b and similar exoplanets are generally not capable of supporting an atmosphere over sufficiently long timescales when the stellar wind pressure is high. It is only if the pressure is sufficiently low, and if the exoplanet has a reasonably strong magnetic shield like that of the Earth’s magnetosphere, that the exoplanet can retain an atmosphere and has the potential for habitability.”

Image: Is the stellar wind capable of reducing a planetary atmosphere to the point where surface life is impossible? Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The paper finds that ion escape rates at Proxima b are two orders of magnitude higher than the terrestrial planets of our Solar System, assuming that the planet is unmagnetized. But even in the presence of a magnetosphere, ion escape rates are still higher than any we see in our system’s planets. The same issues apply at TRAPPIST-1, as noted in the new paper, which implicates stellar wind values as the primary driver in ion escape:

…as seen from our Solar system, the ion escape rates for Venus, Mars and Earth are similar despite their compositions, sizes and magnetic field strengths being wildly dissimilar (Lammer, 2013; Brain et al., 2016), thereby indicating that the ion escape rates may be more sensitive to stellar wind parameters; this is also partly borne out by the atmospheric ion escape rate calculations for Proxima b (Airapetian et al., 2017; Dong et al., 2017). Second, we observe that the inner planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system could have experienced significant losses of H₂ and water over fast timescales (Bolmont et al., 2017; Bourrier et al., 2017), leaving behind other atmospheric components…

Dong also notes that planets close enough to be in a red dwarf’s habitable zone are likely tidally locked, producing constant bombardment on the star-facing side that would intensify the effects of atmospheric loss whether or not the planet has a protective magnetosphere. Earlier work has suggested that tidally locked planets are unlikely to have more than a weak magnetic field.

I’m focusing now on the TRAPPIST-1 paper because it’s the latest work on this matter, and it amplifies what was found in the earlier Proxima Centauri b work; I give citations for both papers below. Considering TRAPPIST-1 in light of stellar winds, the researchers argue that TRAPPIST-1h, viewed purely from the perspective of atmospheric loss, is the one most likely to have retained its atmosphere, but this is not a world where liquid water is possible on the surface. Dong and colleagues believe that TRAPPIST-1g thus represents “…the best chance for a habitable planet in this planetary system to support a stable atmosphere over long periods,” as the stellar wind effects diminish with distance.

It’s not a pleasant picture for those hoping for clement conditions on other planets around TRAPPIST-1 or Proxima Centauri. Oceans may once have existed there, but this work suggests that their surfaces today are probably dry. While the two papers focus on Proxima b and the TRAPPIST-1 worlds, Dong notes that the newly discovered planet around Ross 128 may have better prospects, as its star appears to be quieter than Proxima Centauri or TRAPPIST-1.

We should also note that an atmosphere can be replenished by outgassing, a reminder that analyzing an atmosphere over billion-year timeframes demands, as the paper notes, “…an in-depth understanding of the interplay between source and loss mechanisms.” Another issue: Stellar properties evolve, so that atmospheric escape rates change. This may not work to life’s advantage, however, for pre-main sequence M-dwarfs, according to Dong’s simulations, would produce even stronger stellar wind effects upon a young planet’s atmosphere.

The implications for other planetary systems seem clear:

For a given star, the mass-loss rate is fixed, implying that the escape rate is lower for smaller planets orbiting at greater distances. Hence, we suggest the following strategy for prioritizing studies of multi-planetary systems. If more than one exoplanet resides within the HZ of a given star, it may be more prudent to focus on the outward planet(s) since the atmospheric escape rates are likely to be lower. Similarly, when confronted with two planets with similar values of R_x and a [radius and semi-major axis], we propose that searches should focus on stars with lower mass-loss rates and magnetic activity.

The examination of the effects of stellar winds will proceed with soon-to-be-launched missions like the James Webb Space Telescope, allowing us to put theoretical work to the test. Given the surprises we’ve consistently found even with our interplanetary probes, Pluto being the most recent example, we can fairly confidently expect to modify our views with each new exoplanet atmospheric characterization. For now, though, these continuing studies raise serious questions about red dwarf planets as a clement venue for life.

The papers are Dong et al., “Is Proxima Centauri b habitable? — A study of atmospheric loss,” Astrophysical Journal Letters Vol. 837, No. 2 (10 March 2017) (abstract/ preprint); and Dong et al., “Atmospheric escape from the TRAPPIST-1 planets and implications for habitability,” accepted at Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint).

TRAPPIST-1 and its seven interesting planets may be the most compelling stellar system we’re investigating, given the range of worlds here and the possibilities for analyzing an entire, nearby planetary system. But as we look toward examining systems like this with new space- and ground-based instruments, we may run into problems with searching for biosignatures. Both the TRAPPIST-1 planets and the promising Proxima Centauri b may be tough to characterize.

The problem: When searching for biosignatures, we’re looking for signs of metabolism, gases that are continually produced and remain out of balance in a planetary atmosphere. Ozone is one piece of the puzzle, one that signifies oxygen. Finding the latter in the same atmosphere with methane would be a compelling biosignature. But ozone could be hard to detect.

Ludmila Carone (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) and colleagues now find that atmospheric circulation in planets close enough to red dwarfs to be in their habitable zone may mask the very signs we’re looking for. Ozone may become undetectable, trapped in equatorial regions.

The issue involves atmospheric flows, which will likely differ from what we see on Earth. The ozone in our stratosphere is formed when ultraviolet light from the Sun triggers chemical reactions in the oxygen molecules that make up approximately one-fifth of our atmosphere. The ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and is distributed throughout the atmosphere owing to large-scale air flows moving from the equatorial regions to the poles.

Image: Earth’s atmosphere has a “transportation belt” of air flows which move ozone from the main production areas near the equator towards the poles. This mechanism is important for creating Earth’s global ozone layer. Credit: MPIA (L. Carone & Graphics Dept.)

The problem for exoplanetology is that red dwarf planets in orbits of less than 25 days may be tidally locked to their star, presenting the same face to it at all times. Tidal lock, which we’ve examined often in these pages, could conceivably still allow enough heat to circulate to avoid the kind of extremes between dark and light sides that could prevent life from emerging. But for planets like these, Carone’s models show major air flows moving in the opposite direction, from the poles to the equator. The ozone we seek, then, could be trapped in the equatorial region.

Image: As a new study by Ludmila Carone shows, certain exoplanets could have air flows that serve to trap ozone in the equatorial regions. This could present an unforeseen complication for the search for traces of life on these planets. For those who don’t speak German — my apologies, but I only have this image with German annotation. Credit: MPIA (L. Carone & Graphics Dept.)

This possibility is one we’ll need to consider as we begin the analysis of atmospheres on terrestrial-class planets around nearby red dwarfs. We may find no ozone on planets where ozone and oxygen might actually exist, though sequestered in places that might be difficult to detect. That’s a reverse take on the usual ‘false positive’ problem we’ve discussed here before, with abundant oxygen, for example, not necessarily being a marker for biological activity.

On the other hand, it’s worth asking whether a planet with ozone only in its equatorial regions would be capable of developing life in the first place. On that score, Carrone has an answer:

“In principle: yes. Proxima b and TRAPPIST-1d orbit red dwarfs, reddish stars that emit very little harmful UV-light to begin with. On the other hand, these stars can be very temperamental, and prone to violent outbursts of harmful radiation including UV. There is still a lot that we don’t know about these red dwarf stars. But I’m confident we will know much more in five years.”

True enough, assuming a successful launch of instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, and the gradual emergence of the next generation of ground-based instruments. But as a marker for oxygen and potential life, exoplanet ozone may be a challenging detection.

The paper is Carone et al., “Stratosphere circulation on tidally locked ExoEarths,” Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 473, Issue 4, pp. 4672-4685 (abstract).