English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Exozodiacal dust, warm debris from comets and asteroids in and near thehabitable zone of stellar systems, reveals the physical processes that shapeplanetary systems. Scattered light from this dust is also a source ofbackground flux which must be overcome by future missions to image Earthlikeplanets. This study quantifies the sensitivity of the Nancy Grace Roman SpaceTelescope Coronagraph to light scattered by exozodi, the zodiacal dust aroundother stars. Using a sample of 149 nearby stars, previously selected foroptimum detection of habitable exoplanets by space observatories, we find themaximum number of exozodiacal disks with observable \textit{inner} habitablezone boundaries is six and the number of observable outer habitable boundariesis 74. One zodi was defined as the visible-light surface brightness of 22$m_{\rm V}\ $arcsec$^{-2}$ around a solar-mass star, approximating thescattered light brightness in visible light at the Earth-equivalent insolation.In the speckle limited case, where the signal-to-noise ratio is limited byspeckle temporal stability rather than shot noise, the median $5\sigma$sensitivity to habitable zone exozodi is 12 zodi per resolution element. Thisestimate is calculated at the inner-working angle of the coronagraph, for thecurrent best estimate performance, neglecting margins on the uncertainty ininstrument performance and including a post-processing speckle suppressionfactor. For an log-norm distribution of exozodi levels with a median exozodi of3$\times$ the solar zodi, we find that the Roman Coronagraph would be able tomake 5$\sigma$ detections of exozodiacal disks in scattered light from 13systems with a 95\% confidence interval spanning 7-20 systems. This sensitivityallows Roman Coronagraph to complement ground-based measurements of exozodiacalthermal emission and constrain dust albedos.

Sensitivity of the Roman Coronagraph Instrument to Exozodiacal Dust