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New paper on exoplanet frequencies with PLATO

A new paper released today on the ArXiv by Dimitri Veras et al. discusses using PLATO to detect a trend for exoplanet frequency to decrease as the host stars of two-planet systems get older. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

The space mission PLATO will usher in a new era of exoplanetary science by expanding our current inventory of transiting systems and constraining host star ages, which are currently highly uncertain. This capability might allow PLATO to detect changes in planetary system architecture with time, particularly because planetary scattering due to Lagrange instability may be triggered long after the system was formed. Here, we utilize previously published instability timescale prescriptions to determine PLATO's capability to detect a trend of decreasing planet frequency with age for systems with equal-mass planets. For two-planet systems, our results demonstrate that PLATO may detect a trend for planet masses which are at least as massive as super-Earths. For systems with three or more planets, we link their initial compactness to potentially detectable frequency trends in order to aid future investigations when these populations will be better characterized.

Fri 17 Jul 2015, 12:58 | Tags: The PLATO 2,0 project, PLATO 2.0, ArXiv, Exoplanets, Publication, PSPM