A Compact, Coherent Representation of Stellar Surface Variation in the Spectral Domain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact spectral domain representation of stellar surface variations that improves radial velocity measurements by reducing stellar noise while preserving planetary signals.

Contribution

It presents a novel spectral projection space sensitive to stellar surface features, enabling more effective disentanglement of stellar variability from planetary signals in RV data.

Findings

Reduces RV scatter by 60-80% using the new spectral projection.

Demonstrates that stellar signals are not purely orthogonal to Doppler shifts.

Provides a framework for implementing stellar variability mitigation on real data.

Abstract

Time-varying inhomogeneities on stellar surfaces constitute one of the largest sources of radial velocity (RV) error for planet detection and characterization. We show that stellar variations, because they manifest on coherent, rotating surfaces, give rise to changes that are complex but useably compact and coherent in the spectral domain. Methods for disentangling stellar signals in RV measurements benefit from modeling the full domain of spectral pixels. We simulate spectra of spotted stars using starry and construct a simple spectrum projection space that is sensitive to the orientation and size of stellar surface features. Regressing measured RVs in this projection space reduces RV scatter by 60-80% while preserving planet shifts. We note that stellar surface variability signals do not manifest in spectral changes that are purely orthogonal to a Doppler shift or exclusively asymmetric in line profiles; enforcing orthogonality or focusing exclusively on asymmetric features will not make use of all the information present in the spectra. We conclude with a discussion of existing and possible implementations on real data based on the presented compact, coherent framework for stellar signal mitigation.