HARPS-N observes the Sun as a star
Xavier Dumusque, Alex Glenday, David F. Phillips, Nicolas, Buchschacher, Andrew Collier Cameron, Massimo Cecconi, David Charbonneau,, Rosario Cosentino, Adriano Ghedina, David W. Latham, Chih-Hao Li, Marcello, Lodi, Christophe Lovis, Emilio Molinari, Francesco Pepe

TL;DR
This study uses a solar telescope feeding sunlight into HARPS-N to observe the Sun as a star, aiming to understand and correct stellar surface noise affecting radial velocity measurements for exoplanet detection.
Contribution
It introduces a novel setup for long-term, high-precision solar radial velocity observations to study stellar noise and develop correction techniques.
Findings
Achieved 50 cm/s radial velocity rms over a few hours.
Reduced weekly radial velocity rms to 60 cm/s after correction.
Demonstrated potential to detect Venus and Earth-like planets using improved methods.
Abstract
Radial velocity perturbations induced by stellar surface inhomogeneities including spots, plages and granules currently limit the detection of Earth-twins using Doppler spectroscopy. Such stellar noise is poorly understood for stars other than the Sun because their surface is unresolved. In particular, the effects of stellar surface inhomogeneities on observed stellar radial velocities are extremely difficult to characterize, and thus developing optimal correction techniques to extract true stellar radial velocities is extremely challenging. In this paper, we present preliminary results of a solar telescope built to feed full-disk sunlight into the HARPS-N spectrograph, which is in turn calibrated with an astro-comb. This setup enables long-term observation of the Sun as a star with state-of-the-art sensitivity to radial velocity changes. Over seven days of observing in 2014, we show an…
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