Kavli Affiliate: Sara Seager
| First 5 Authors: TRAPPIST-1 JWST Community Initiative, :, Julien de Wit, René Doyon, Benjamin V. Rackham
| Summary:
Ultra-cool dwarf stars are abundant, long-lived, and uniquely suited to
enable the atmospheric study of transiting terrestrial companions with JWST.
Amongst them, the most prominent is the M8.5V star TRAPPIST-1 and its seven
planets, which have been the favored targets of eight JWST Cycle 1 programs.
While 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. We notably recommend that — although more challenging to
schedule — multi-transit windows be prioritized to constrain stellar
heterogeneities and gather up to 2$times$ more transits per JWST hour spent.
We conclude that in such systems planets cannot be studied in isolation by
small programs, thus large-scale community-supported programs should be
supported to enable the efficient and robust exploration of terrestrial
exoplanets in the JWST era.
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