Probing Planetary Architectures with SPICE
- Author(s)
- Brenda Matthews, Petr Pokorny, Katie Crotts, Grant Kennedy, Luca Matra, Joan Najita, Nicole Pawellek, Kate Su, Mark Wyatt, David Leisawitz
- Abstract
Understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems is a challenging area of study, requiring high spatial resolution and special techniques to observe planets in formation in protoplanetary disks and the resulting disk/planet systems that are created. These systems provide a point of comparison to our own Solar System, in which we know that the architecture of the asteroid and comet belts provide strong constraints on how the planets, particularly the outer gas and ice giants, evolved. The signatures of that evolution are imprinted in these planetesimal belts, which are detectable and therefore provide constraints to planetary populations beyond the Solar System. The ALMA telescope has provided a powerful new window into the formation phase of protoplanets, thereby probing planetary architectures at the earliest times. What we have been missing is a means to observe the diversity of substructure in the much fainter debris disks (2-3 orders of magnitude) at later times. Achieving this requires unprecedented spatial resolution in the far-infrared, where these disks emit most strongly. SPICE will widen the window to planetary architectures to these later epochs; the differences we observe will reveal how planetary systems evolve. The proposed SPICE probe will enable a disk legacy survey of 100 known disks around nearby stars through the evolutionary phases of terrestrial planet formation, through the migration phase, to stable, mature planetary systems. In fact, these data will provide the best picture of the planetary populations of outer planetary systems, which cannot be probed by any other planet-finding method.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Astrophysics
- External organisation(s)
- Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre, Catholic University of America, University of Victoria, University of Warwick, National University of Ireland, NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, University of Cambridge, University of Arizona, National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)
- Journal
- Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society
- Volume
- 55
- No. of pages
- 1
- ISSN
- 0002-7537
- Publication date
- 01-2023
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103004 Astrophysics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/9ceff949-262c-41e4-ae53-6d9b78c44c1a