2003/08/13 by Jean-Francois Lestrade
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph
published as Proceedings of an International Conference on Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar PlanetsSymposium, held on June 18-21, 2002, in Washington DC, USA, ASP Conference Series, vol. 294, 2003, Editor Drake Deming and Seager, p. 587-590 · 5 pages; 1 table; 2 figures Latex
arxiv created 2003/08/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
The most complete catalogue of nearby stars (Gliese and Jarheiss, 1991) has been used to search for the stars whose photospheric thermal emission can be detected by the future millimeter array ALMA. We found that 446 nearby stars with spectral types ranging from A to M are detectable. A long-term astrometric observation programme (> 10 yr) of these stars with ALMA (theoretical astrometric precision = 0.1 milliarcsecond) would be sensitive to wobbles caused by the gravitational pull of possible unseen planets. Such a programme would probe minimum planetary masses as low as 0.1 Jupiter for an orbital period of 10 years. We provide histogrammes of these minimum masses and of ALMA integration times for these 446 ALMA stars.