Using chromatic covariance to correct for scintillation noise in ground-based spectrophotometry
arXiv:2510.10941 · doi:10.1093/mnras/staf1461
Abstract
Atmospheric scintillation is one of the largest sources of error in ground-based spectrophotometry, reducing the precision of astrophysical signals extracted from the time-series of bright objects to that of much fainter objects. Relative to the fundamental Poisson noise, scintillation is not effectively reduced by observing with larger telescopes, and alternative solutions are needed to maximize the spectrophotometric precision of large telescopes. If the chromatic covariance of the scintillation is known, it can be used to reduce the scintillation noise in spectrophotometry. This paper derives analytical solutions for the chromatic covariance of stellar scintillation on a large telescope for a given atmospheric turbulence profile, wind speed, wind direction, and airmass at optical/near-infrared wavelengths. To demonstrate how scintillation noise is isolated, scintillation-limited exoplanet transit spectroscopy is simulated. Then, a procedure is developed to remove scintillation noise and produce Poisson-noise limited light curves. The efficacy and limits of this technique will be tested with on sky observations of a new, high spectrophotometric precision, low resolution spectrograph.
14 pages, 10 figures, Appendix
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