A Full Implementation of Spectro-Perfectionism for Precise Radial Velocity Exoplanet Detection: A Test Case With the MINERVA Reduction Pipeline

TL;DR

This paper implements a computationally feasible spectro-perfectionism method within a full spectral reduction pipeline, improving radial velocity precision for exoplanet detection, demonstrated on the MINERVA dataset.

Contribution

It provides the first full implementation of spectro-perfectionism integrated with a raw reduction pipeline for precise radial velocity measurements.

Findings

Spectro-perfectionism achieves RV precision comparable to optimal extraction.

The implementation processes a MINERVA exposure in approximately 30 minutes.

Reliable calibration data is crucial for PSF fitting and RV accuracy.

Abstract

We present a computationally tractable implementation of spectro-perfectionism, a method which minimizes error imparted by spectral extraction. We develop our method in conjunction with a full raw reduction pipeline for the MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA), capable of performing both optimal extraction and spectro-perfectionism. Although spectro-perfectionism remains computationally expensive, our implementation can extract a MINERVA exposure in approximately $30\,\text{min}$. We describe our localized extraction procedure and our approach to point spread function fitting. We compare the performance of both extraction methods on a set of 119 exposures on HD122064, an RV standard star. Both the optimal extraction and spectro-perfectionism pipelines achieve nearly identical RV precision under a six-exposure chronological binning. We discuss the importance of reliable calibration data for point spread function fitting and the potential of spectro-perfectionism for future precise radial velocity exoplanet studies.