Detection Limits of Low-mass, Long-period Exoplanets Using Gaussian Processes Applied to HARPS-N Solar Radial Velocities
Published version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Change log
Authors
Abstract
Radial velocity (RV) searches for Earth-mass exoplanets in the habitable zone
around Sun-like stars are limited by the effects of stellar variability on the
host star. In particular, suppression of convective blueshift and brightness
inhomogeneities due to photospheric faculae/plage and starspots are the
dominant contribution to the variability of such stellar RVs. Gaussian process
(GP) regression is a powerful tool for statistically modeling these
quasi-periodic variations. We investigate the limits of this technique using
800 days of RVs from the solar telescope on the High Accuracy Radial velocity
Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere (HARPS-N) spectrograph. These data
provide a well-sampled time series of stellar RV variations. Into this data
set, we inject Keplerian signals with periods between 100 and 500 days and
amplitudes between 0.6 and 2.4 m s
Description
Keywords
Journal Title
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1538-3881