Precise and efficient modeling of stellar-activity-affected solar spectra using SOAP-GPU

TL;DR

This paper presents two realistic solar activity simulations using SOAP-GPU, accurately modeling stellar activity effects on spectra and radial velocities, aiding exoplanet detection efforts.

Contribution

It introduces two novel methods for modeling solar activity with SOAP-GPU and demonstrates their high accuracy in replicating real solar spectral data.

Findings

Simulated RV behavior matches HARPS-N observations within 0.9 m/s.

Stellar rotation and harmonic periodicities are well modeled.

Strong spectral line correlations support spectral-level activity modeling.

Abstract

One of the main obstacles in exoplanet detection when using the radial velocity (RV) technique is the presence of stellar activity signal induced by magnetic regions. In this context, a realistic simulated dataset that can provide photometry and spectroscopic outputs is needed for method development. The goal of this paper is to describe two realistic simulations of solar activity obtained from SOAP-GPU and to compare them with real data obtained from the HARPS-N solar telescope. We describe two different methods of modeling solar activity using SOAP-GPU. The first models the evolution of active regions based on the spot number as a function of time. The second method relies on the extraction of active regions from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) data. The simulated spectral time series generated with the first method shows a long-term RV behavior similar to that seen in the HARPS-N solar observations. The effect of stellar activity induced by stellar rotation is also well modeled with prominent periodicities at the stellar rotation period and its first harmonic. The comparison between the simulated spectral time series generated using SDO images and the HARPS-N solar spectra shows that SOAP-GPU can precisely model the RV time series of the Sun to a precision better than 0.9 m/s. By studying the width and depth variations of each spectral line in the HARPS-N solar and SOAP-GPU data, we find a strong correlation between the observation and the simulation for strong spectral lines, therefore supporting the modeling of the stellar activity effect at the spectral level. These simulated solar spectral time series serve as a useful test bed for evaluating spectral-level stellar activity mitigation techniques.