Rogue Planets in Real Time
| Program ID | 19015 |
|---|---|
| Science Category | Exoplanets & Exoplanet Formation |
| Program Type | Analysis |
| Category | Small |
| Principal Investigator | Rachel Street |
| PI Institution | Las Cumbres Observatory |
| Co-Investigators |
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| Abstract | Free-floating planets (FFPs) present an opportunity for the exoplanet community to do early science with Roman, as early as within the first season. This is because free-floating planet events are shorter in duration than bound planet events, easier light curves to characterize, and we expect to be seeing ~1-2 per day. However, they also present a challenge with respect to their bound counterparts---they are harder to discriminate from false positives, which outnumber them by a large margin. The best possible approach for getting a robust catalog of free-floating planets is to leverage as many different observations as possible. Ground-based surveys such as OGLE, KMTnet, MOA, (and eventually LSST) can provide much longer, better characterized baselines in comparison to Roman alone; joint simultaneous observations from these surveys, as well as PRIME, Subaru, DEcam, and more will allow us to break key degeneracies and get precise measurements of FFP masses, velocities, and distances. Roman is only scoped to do light curve analysis on its own data; the community needs a centralized resource that can collate Roman data with all of these datasets as well and use them simultaneously to provide the best possible catalog. We propose to build a centralized interactive database that will collate all available light curves for events detected by the Roman Project Infrastructure Team's FFP detection pipeline and will perform real-time joint analysis of the combined dataset. This database will provide key diagnostic metrics for each event that will allow the user to manipulate in live time the false positive rejection, event selection, and model preference criteria, providing a flexible and dynamic resource that will enable early exoplanet science by the whole community within the first Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey season. |