Lazuli Space Telescope: 27 giant exoplanets retained as first targets of his reflected light coronographer

For the ESC instrument of the 3-metre telescope funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, two astronomers draw up an initial list of planets of ages and temperatures never observed in direct imaging.

Observing the light of a star reflected by an exoplanet makes it possible to study its atmosphere regardless of its age, and at shallower distances from the star than in the thermal infrared, until the possible search for biosignatures. The Lazuli Space Telescope, a 3-metre instrument recently announced by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System, will carry the ExtraSolar Coronagraph (ESC), designed to observe gas giants illuminated by their star in visible light.

In an article published on arXiv, Logan Pearce and Ewan Douglas present the first list of targets of this campaign: 27 already known giant exoplanets, covering ages and temperatures that direct imaging has never before probed. Some will also be accessible to the coronagraph of the Nancy Grace Roman telescope and the METIS thermal imager of the ELT, which would make it possible to cross-reference the observations to characterize their atmospheres more completely. The authors detail the expected science and what future astrometric and radial velocity measurements will bring to refine the orbits.