The most sensitive planet-hunting instruments ever built are being blinded by the stars themselves. New spectrometers can detect the wobble of a star caused by an orbiting Earth-sized planet, and the James Webb Space Telescope can sniff the chemistry of rocky worlds—but the stars’ own turbulent surfaces, roiling with convection and magnetic activity, create noise that swamps these faint signals. This project tackles that “variability problem” by building realistic computer simulations of entire stellar surfaces, resolving individual convective cells, then feeding those virtual stars through the same data pipelines used for real observations. The team will also observe the Sun and stars known to host small planets found by TESS and PLATO, using the stars’ own spectra to learn how to subtract their variability from measurements of planetary mass and atmospheric composition. If successful, the work will unlock the full potential of next-generation observatories. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application, but it directly addresses the single biggest obstacle to answering one of humanity’s oldest questions: whether Earth-like planets are common, and whether any show signs of life.
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For millennia people have wondered, "Do other Earths exist?" "Are they common?" "Would they show signs of life?". We now have the technical capability to answer these questions. New radial-velocity spectrometers are capable of detecting the reflex motions of stars hosting Earth-mass planets in their habitable zones; the James Webb Space Telescope has the power to probe the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. Yet the unprecedented precision of these instruments' measurement capabilities is up against a fundamental astrophysically-imposed barrier to achieving these goals: contamination of exoplanetary signals by stellar activity and variability. Further progress is contingent on solving this "variability problem". REVEAL gathers world-leading experts in exoplanetary and stellar physics to tackle this problem in synergy: - We will build on recent advances in magnetohydrodynamic simulations of stellar atmospheres, and data-driven efforts to separate the exoplanet signal from the stellar variability. - We will simulate the "ground truth" of the turbulent physics of entire stellar photospheres resolved at the level of individual convective cells for a broad class of stars. - We will model the emergent spectra of these "virtual" stars and "observe" them using the same data-processing pipelines as stellar radial-velocity and transit-spectroscopy observations. We will continue to observe the Sun and stars hosting small planets found with TESS and PLATO. The stars' own spectra will REVEAL the clues needed to disentangle stellar variability from our measurements of their planets' masses and the fingerprints of molecules in their atmospheres. Our unified efforts will enable the new cutting-edge space observatories and ground-based facilities to realize the full potential of their designs, bringing us closer to the most profound discoveries we could hope to achieve in our lifetimes - the identification of another Earth or even possible signs of life on another planet.
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