The PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator: A tool to generate realistic stellar light-curves with instrumental effects representative of the PLATO mission

Abstract

The preparation of science objectives of the ESA's PLATO space mission will require the implementation of hare-and-hound exercises relying on the massive generation of representative simulated light-curves. We developed a light-curve simulator named the PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator (PSLS) in order to generate light-curves representative of typical PLATO targets, i.e. showing simultaneously solar-like oscillations, stellar granulation, and magnetic activity. At the same time, PSLS also aims at mimicking in a realistic way the random noise and the systematic errors representative of the PLATO multi-telescope concept. To quantify the instrumental systematic errors, we performed a series of simulations at pixel level that include various relevant sources of perturbations expected for PLATO. From the simulated pixels, we extract the photometry as planned on-board. The simulated light-curves are then corrected for instrumental effects using the instrument Point Spread Functions reconstructed on the basis of a microscanning technique that will be operated during the in-flight calibration phases. These corrected light-curves are then fitted by a parametric model, which we incorporated in PSLS. We show that the instrumental systematic errors dominate the signal only at frequencies below 20muHz and are found to mainly depend on stellar magnitude and on the detector charge transfer inefficiency. To illustrate how realistic our simulator is, we compared its predictions with observations made by Kepler on three typical targets and found a good qualitative agreement with the observations. PSLS reproduces the main properties of expected PLATO light-curves. Its speed of execution and its inclusion of relevant stellar signals as well as sources of noises representative of the PLATO cameras make it an indispensable tool for the scientific preparation of the PLATO mission.

19 pages, 16 figures, Astronomy & Astrophysics (in press)

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Cited by in corpus (17)

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• PlatoSim: An end-to-end PLATO camera simulator for modelling high-precision space-based photometry
• Exoplanets Across Galactic Stellar Populations with PLATO: Estimating Exoplanet Yields Around FGK Stars for the Thin Disk, Thick Disk and Stellar Halo
• Atmospheric Characterization via Broadband Color Filters on the PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) Mission
• Converting the sub-Jovian desert of exoplanets to a savanna with TESS, PLATO and Ariel
• MOCKA -- A PLATO mock asteroseismic catalogue: Simulations for gravity-mode oscillators
• Discovering planets with PLATO: Comparison of algorithms for stellar activity filtering
• Granulation signatures in 3D hydrodynamical simulations: evaluating background model performance using a Bayesian nested sampling framework
• Granulation signatures as seen by Kepler short-cadence data. I. A decoupling between granulation and oscillation timescales for dwarfs
• Impact of Charge Transfer Inefficiency on transit light-curves: A correction strategy for PLATO
• gallifrey: JAX-based Gaussian process structure learning for astronomical time series
• The impact of faculae on the radius determination of exoplanets: The case of the M-star GJ1214
• Detecting false positives with PLATO using double-aperture photometry and centroid shifts
• Panopticon: a novel deep learning model to detect single transit events with no prior data filtering in PLATO light curves
• Optimized cutting off transit algorithm to study stellar rotation from PLATO mission light curves