Giant planets around young active stars

Although our understanding of how planetary systems come to exist has drastically improved over the last two decades, there is still plenty of research to be made around the formation and evolution of massive, short-orbit exoplanets e.g. hot Jupiters, warm Neptunes. Do they form through migration mechanism or through in-situ formation? By better understanding the occurrence rates of these types of planets in every stage of a star’s life, we can better understand their fate and hope to favour one formation/evolution mechanism over another. In this context, it is crucial to estimate the population of these weird planets around young stars. Unfortunately, probing young stars is notoriously difficult due to their strong magnetic activity (or ‘jitter’) inducing spurious radial velocity (RV) signals that often mask the planet(s) RV signature(s) used to detect them.

In Heitzmann et al. 2021 (in prep), we attempted to recover simulated planetary signatures hidden behind real stellar RV data exhibiting large jitter. We used two distinct activity-filtering techniques (Doppler imaging and Gaussian process) and found that it is possible to hunt for short-orbit gas giants in existing data, gathered using non-stabilised spectrograph in the scope of stellar surveys.