SOAP. A tool for the fast computation of photometry and radial velocity induced by stellar spots

TL;DR

SOAP is a fast, versatile software tool that simulates the impact of stellar spots on radial velocity and photometry, aiding in exoplanet detection and stellar activity analysis.

Contribution

This paper introduces SOAP, a new software for simulating stellar spot effects, with validated performance and applications to real star data.

Findings

SOAP accurately models radial velocity variations due to stellar spots.

The software's speed enables extensive simulations for stellar activity studies.

Application to real stars demonstrates SOAP's effectiveness in reproducing observations.

Abstract

We define and put at the disposal of the community SOAP, Spot Oscillation And Planet, a software tool that simulates the effect of stellar spots and plages on radial velocimetry and photometry. This paper describes the tool release and provides instructions for its use. We present detailed tests with previous computations and real data to assess the code's performance and to validate its suitability. We characterize the variations of the radial velocity, line bisector, and photometric amplitude as a function of the main variables: projected stellar rotational velocity, filling factor of the spot, resolution of the spectrograph, linear limb-darkening coefficient, latitude of the spot, and inclination of the star. Finally, we model the spot distributions on the active stars HD166435, TW Hya and HD189733 which reproduces the observations. We show that the software is remarkably fast allowing several evolutions in its capabilities that could be performed to study the next challenges in the exoplanetary field connected with the stellar variability.