Disentangling stellar activity and planetary signals

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to distinguish stellar activity signals from planetary signals in radial velocity data by simulating star spots and analyzing their effects, improving exoplanet detection accuracy.

Contribution

The study introduces a new approach using sinusoidal fitting at stellar rotation harmonics to effectively separate stellar activity from planetary signals in RV measurements.

Findings

The method removes about 90% of RV jitter caused by stellar activity.

Successfully applied to known active stars, improving planetary mass estimates.

Disentangling is effective when planetary signals differ from stellar rotation harmonics.

Abstract

Photospheric stellar activity might be an important source of noise and confusion in the radial-velocity measurements. RV planet search surveys as well as follow-up of photometric transit surveys require a deeper understanding and characterization of the effects of stellar activities to disentangle it from planetary signals. We simulate dark spots on a rotating stellar photosphere. The variations of the photometry, RV and spectral line shapes are characterized and analyzed according to the stellar inclination, the latitude and the number of spots. The Lomb-Scargle periodograms of the RV variations induced by activity present power at the rotational period Prot of the star and its two-first harmonics Prot/2 and Prot/3. Three adjusted sinusoids fixed at Prot and its two-first harmonics allow to remove about 90% of the RV jitter amplitude. We apply and validate our approach on four known active planet-host stars: HD189733, GJ674, CoRoT-7 and iHor. We succeed in fitting simultaneously activity and planetary signals on GJ674 and CoRoT-7. This simultaneous modeling of the activity and planetary parameters leads to slightly larger masses of CoRoT-7b and c: respectively, 5.7+/-2.5ME and 13.1+/-4.1ME. The larger uncertainties take into account properly for the stellar active jitter. We excluded short-period low-mass exoplanets around iHor. For data with realistic time-sampling and white Gaussian noise, we use simulations to show that our approach is efficient to disentangle reflex-motion due to a planetary companion and stellar-activity induced-RV variations provided that 1) the planetary orbital period is not close to that of the stellar rotation or one of its two-first harmonics 2) the semi-amplitude of the planet exceeds 30% of the semi-amplitude of the active signal 3) the rotational period of the star is accurately known 4) the data cover more than one stellar rotational period.