Gaia, ESA new approach to discover new exoplanets and celestial body

Gaia the next in line ESA space telescope will monitor the star position working at almost all sin i. If it work the number of new exoplanet will go to the roof.

Gaia will conduct a census of a thousand million stars in our Galaxy, monitoring each of its target stars about 70 times over a five-year period. It will precisely chart their positions, distances, movements, and changes in brightness. It is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs. Within our own Solar System, Gaia should also observe hundreds of thousands of asteroids.

That might be interesting not hunderd but 10th of thousands.
See it at:http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120377_index_1_m.html#subhead0

Yes, Roland, this mission could be the first project, which will discovery more than a thousand of confirmed exoplanets. Astrometric planets will not need to validate ground-based telescopes. But will not until 2020, when the collected data GAIA be analyzed.

Here are some pictures about the possibilities of mission.

http://www.rssd.esa.int/SA/GAIA/docs/info_sheets/IN_all_info_sheets.pdf

In addition, the latest news on the project
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Delivery_Of_Gaia_Primary_Mirrors_999.html

Launch of Gaia on a Soyuz-Fregat is currently scheduled for November 2012.

In the lengthy paper presenting the expected Gaia capabilities, It points out that the system would be capable to discover all hot jupiter in a 30 to 60 parsec around the sun or 350K stars. If the "hot Jupiter" statistics are correct at 0.6 to 1% this would mean 2500 to 3500 "hot Jupiter".
I ran a quick calculation and assuming that a hot jupiter moves its star by 150K KM or 1/2 sec they should be able to do the 60 PC.

This result should come 2 years after launch or 2014.
But hot Jupiter are bad sign for the other planets. At least we would know where not to look

Hot Jupiters are hard to detect through astrometry because while the radial velocity reflex motion is high, the barycentric semi-major axis of the star is not. The star wobbles around furiously but never deviates far from the system barycentre, resulting in a very low astrometric detectability.

I would argue Gaia will be ill-equipped to detect hot Jupiters through astrometry.

You are right, I ran my numbers again and I got 1Ly for Gaia threshold detection for a hot Jupiter ( obviouly no use), they need 100 times more or 15M km deviation to be able to detect the star deviation at 100 ly.The planet need to be 100 times futher or more like 400 M km, that is more like our own Jupiter.
That will not be published before 2020.
Damn

In addition, the project can detect short-periodic transits of the planets. See my link above.

Certainly 10 years is a long time. But there are many other projects that will discovery up a lot of planets in the coming years. Roland may read this section forum.

For example I can name more than a dozen projects that are search for rocky planets.

You are right Boris, a lot of projects, but few have the capability to come up with 10K planets.
The ground telescope search should be made just a complementary of the space telescope search. An example that I like, is the one of the 2 Saturn planets recently discovered by Kepler. A few RV reading was enough to confirm them, anthe rest can be deducted from the ongoing measurements.
In the near future it will make almost no sense of measuring so many parameters for the planets and spend so much time on one.
The system will be overflowing with it, Kepler is the proof of that 700 candidates and they cannot handle it, what about 10.000 or 100.000.
They are as many planets as there is stars. as the volume grows, the planet research need to become a lot smarter

Roland Borrey wrote:You are right Boris, a lot of projects, but few have the capability to come up with 10K planets.

I think its a great need for a huge number of planets are not. Now the focus more to the statistical study of the frequency of different types of planets around different types of stars, not their detailed study.

So, for me personally interesting to discover all of the planet within a radius for example of 10 parsecs by using a combination of the method of radial velocities, astrometry and the photographic method, than thousands of confirmed planets around distant stars.

I believe that what we need now is a good solid planetary science and theory; for this we need a lot of planets, several hunderds for each type around each stars, that is 10K+ planets. Working with only a few dozen will leads to wrong assumption and will never answer Drake's equation.
To solve this we should build ASAP 5 Kepler craft looking at different area of the galaxy, the price of such project will be small since it is just a dupliction.

With that in hands you should be able to predict where they are and which planets exist.

Roland Borrey wrote:To solve this we should build ASAP 5 Kepler craft looking at different area of the galaxy, the price of such project will be small since it is just a dupliction.

ESA is developing a more advanced mission PLATO (with a possible launch in 2017-2018).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(spacecraft)

For example the comparison area sky survey of Plato, Kepler and Corot.
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/exoplanets10/udry2/oh/46.jpg
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/exoplanets10/udry2/oh/47.jpg

Comparing the number of planets which can be measured by the mass of Kepler and Plato.
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/exoplanets10/udry2/oh/49.gif

Yes Boris,only 8 years to wait

White Dwarf Planets from GAIA
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6493

We investigate the potential of high-precision astrometry with GAIA for detection of giant planetary companions to nearby white dwarfs. If one considers that, to date, no confirmed planets around single white dwarfs are known, the results from GAIA will be crucial to study the late-stage evolution of planetary systems and to verify the possibility that 2nd-generation planets are formed.

Astrometry and Exoplanets: the Gaia Era, and Beyond
http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3346

The wealth of information in the Gaia catalogue of exoplanets will constitute a fundamental contribution to several hot topics of the astrophysics of planetary systems. I briefly review the potential impact of Gaia micro-arsec astrometry in several areas of exoplanet science, discuss what key follow-up observations might be required as a complement to Gaia data, and shed some light on the role of next generation astrometric facilities in the arena of planetary systems.

I found this cool image on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_barycenter.svg

Is it possibile to figure out from such a graph how many planets orbit around a star, how far, how big,...?