The PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator: A tool to generate realistic stellar light-curves with instrumental effects representative of the PLATO mission

TL;DR

The PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator (PSLS) is a comprehensive tool designed to generate realistic stellar light-curves with instrumental effects for the PLATO mission, aiding in mission preparation and data analysis.

Contribution

We developed PSLS to simulate realistic PLATO-like light-curves including stellar signals and instrumental effects, validated against Kepler data, and suitable for mission planning and analysis.

Findings

Instrumental errors dominate below 20μHz and depend on stellar magnitude.

Simulated light-curves show good qualitative agreement with Kepler observations.

PSLS effectively reproduces main properties of expected PLATO light-curves.

Abstract

The preparation of science objectives of the ESA's PLATO space mission will require the implementation of hare-and-hound exercises relying on the massive generation of representative simulated light-curves. We developed a light-curve simulator named the PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator (PSLS) in order to generate light-curves representative of typical PLATO targets, i.e. showing simultaneously solar-like oscillations, stellar granulation, and magnetic activity. At the same time, PSLS also aims at mimicking in a realistic way the random noise and the systematic errors representative of the PLATO multi-telescope concept. To quantify the instrumental systematic errors, we performed a series of simulations at pixel level that include various relevant sources of perturbations expected for PLATO. From the simulated pixels, we extract the photometry as planned on-board. The simulated light-curves are then corrected for instrumental effects using the instrument Point Spread Functions reconstructed on the basis of a microscanning technique that will be operated during the in-flight calibration phases. These corrected light-curves are then fitted by a parametric model, which we incorporated in PSLS. We show that the instrumental systematic errors dominate the signal only at frequencies below 20muHz and are found to mainly depend on stellar magnitude and on the detector charge transfer inefficiency. To illustrate how realistic our simulator is, we compared its predictions with observations made by Kepler on three typical targets and found a good qualitative agreement with the observations. PSLS reproduces the main properties of expected PLATO light-curves. Its speed of execution and its inclusion of relevant stellar signals as well as sources of noises representative of the PLATO cameras make it an indispensable tool for the scientific preparation of the PLATO mission.