Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Early Universe/Cosmology Lunch Discussion

Echoes of atmospheric escape have been observed in exoplanetary demographics (i.e. the radius valley and lower boundary of the Neptune desert) over the past decade. Simultaneously, we have begun to detect active atmospheric outflows in a few of the most favorable systems, primarily via transmission spectroscopy of the LyA line and metastable helium 10830 triplet. I will describe three of my efforts to advance atmospheric outflow measurements from single-system studies to population-level studies. I will first introduce The Unintentional NIRISS Escape Survey (TUNES), a JWST archival program aimed at automating helium escape detections using low-resolution NIRISS/SOSS data. Over the next few years, TUNES will synthesize observations proposed for different scientific goals into a unified survey of helium escape, cementing JWST's unanticipated legacy as an atmospheric escape machine. Next, I will discuss the WINERED Helium Consortium. Using the new WINERED spectrograph on Magellan/Clay, the Consortium aims to constrain helium absorption to 0.2% precision or better in a sample of 50 sub-Neptunes, achieving population-level constraints on helium escape in small planets. Finally, I will describe the Search for Transiting Exoplanets in Lyman-alpha (STELa): the largest HST program ever awarded to study exoplanets. With 625 orbits allocated over 3 years, STELa endeavors to measure LyA absorption in every nearby (<100 pc) system where it could possibly be observed, all while enabling a broad range of additional treasury science cases.