Exozodiacal Dust As A Limitation To Exoplanet Imaging And Spectroscopy

In addition to planets and other small bodies, stellar systems will likely also host exozodiacal dust, or exozodi.

This warm dust primarily resides in or near the habitable zone of a star, and scatters stellar light in visible to NIR wavelengths, possibly acting as a spatially inhomogeneous fog that can impede our ability to detect and characterize Earth-like exoplanets.

By improving our knowledge of exozodi in the near term with strategic precursor observations and model development, we may be able to mitigate these effects to support a future search for signs of habitability and life with a direct imaging mission.

This white paper introduces exozodi, summarizes its impact on directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets, and outlines several key knowledge gaps and near-term solutions to maximize the science return of future observations.

Miles H. Currie, John Debes, Yasuhiro Hasegawa, Isabel Rebollido, Virginie Faramaz, Steve Ertel, William Danchi, Bertrand Mennesson, Mark Wyatt, NASA SAG23 Members

Comments: NASA DARES RFI white paper response, 5 pages, 1 figure
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2503.19932 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2503.19932v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.19932
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Submission history
From: Miles Currie
[v1] Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:30:00 UTC (1,455 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19932
AStrobiology,