Observing the Sun as a star: Design and early results from the NEID solar feed

TL;DR

This paper describes the design and initial results of a solar feed system for the NEID spectrometer, enabling high-precision Sun-as-a-star observations to study stellar variability and instrumental effects on radial velocity measurements.

Contribution

It introduces the NEID solar feed system and provides early radial velocity stability results demonstrating NEID's capability for precise solar observations.

Findings

Achieved 0.66 m/s RMS RV stability over 4 months

Improved to 0.41 m/s RMS RV under optimal conditions

Data is publicly available for further analysis

Abstract

Efforts with extreme-precision radial velocity (EPRV) instruments to detect small-amplitude planets are largely limited, on many timescales, by the effects of stellar variability and instrumental systematics. One avenue for investigating these effects is the use of small solar telescopes which direct disk-integrated sunlight to these EPRV instruments, observing the Sun at high cadence over months or years. We have designed and built a solar feed system to carry out "Sun-as-a-star" observations with NEID, a very high precision Doppler spectrometer recently commissioned at the WIYN 3.5m Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The NEID solar feed has been taking observations nearly every day since December 2020; data is publicly available at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) NEID Solar Archive: \url{https://neid.ipac.caltech.edu/search_solar.php}. In this paper, we present the design of the NEID solar feed and explanations behind our design intent. We also present early radial velocity (RV) results which demonstrate NEID's RV stability on the Sun over 4 months of commissioning: 0.66~m/s RMS under good sky conditions and improving to 0.41~m/s RMS under best conditions.