The Measured Impact of Chromatic Atmospheric Effects on Barycentric Corrections: Results from the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph

Abstract

One source of error in high-precision radial velocity measurements of exoplanet host stars is chromatic change in Earth's atmospheric transmission during observations. Mitigation of this error requires that the photon-weighted barycentric correction be applied as a function of wavelength across the stellar spectrum. We have designed a system for chromatic photon-weighted barycentric corrections with the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph (EXPRES) and present results from the first year of operations, based on radial velocity measurements of more than $10^3$ high-resolution stellar spectra. For observation times longer than 250 seconds, we find that if the chromatic component of the barycentric corrections is ignored, a range of radial velocity errors up to 1 m s${}^{-1}$ can be incurred with cross-correlation, depending on the nightly atmospheric conditions. For this distribution of errors, the standard deviation is 8.4 cm s${}^{-1}$ for G-type stars, 8.5 cm s${}^{-1}$ for K-type stars, and 2.1 cm s${}^{-1}$ for M-type stars. This error is reduced to well-below the instrumental and photon-noise limited floor by frequent flux sampling of the observed star with a low-resolution exposure meter spectrograph.

11 pages, 7 figures, accepted to AJ

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