Discovering Exoplanets Hidden in the Stellar Noise
The last two decades have seen an exponential rise in exoplanet discoveries. However, true Earth-like planets remain elusive: a primary obstacle to their discovery is that signals intrinsic to stars themselves can drown out or even mimic the signatures of genuine exoplanets, even for the most non-active stars. Understanding and modeling these stellar signals will be essential if we are to use humanity’s next- generation of ultra-precise planet-hunting instruments to detect true Earth-analogue exoplanets. Much research is currently being carried out to try to disentangle stellar signals from planetary signals; this session will bring together the exoplanet scientists faced with this problem, and will focus on the many techniques to tackle it.