Insights on the Spectral Signatures of Stellar Activity and Planets from PCA

Abstract

Photospheric velocities and stellar activity features such as spots and faculae produce measurable radial velocity signals that currently obscure the detection of sub-meter-per-second planetary signals. However, photospheric velocities are imprinted differently in a high-resolution spectrum than Keplerian Doppler shifts. Photospheric activity produces subtle differences in the shapes of absorption lines due to differences in how temperature or pressure affects the atomic transitions. In contrast, Keplerian Doppler shifts affect every spectral line in the same way. With high enough S/N and high enough resolution, statistical techniques can exploit differences in spectra to disentangle the photospheric velocities and detect lower-amplitude exoplanet signals. We use simulated disk-integrated time-series spectra and principal component analysis (PCA) to show that photospheric signals introduce spectral line variability that is distinct from Doppler shifts. We quantify the impact of instrumental resolution and S/N for this work.

12 pages, 7 figures, accepted to ApJ

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• Activity and telluric contamination in HARPS observations of Alpha Centauri B
• The Measured Impact of Chromatic Atmospheric Effects on Barycentric Corrections: Results from the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph
• Data Reduction Pipeline of the TOU Optical Very High Resolution Spectrograph and Its sub-m/s Performance
• Ground-Based Radial Velocity as Critical Support for Future NASA Earth-Finding Missions