viper: High-precision radial velocities from the optical to the infrared (Reaching 3 m/s in the K band of CRIRES+ with telluric modelling)

TL;DR

The paper introduces viper, a versatile pipeline capable of achieving high-precision radial velocity measurements in the optical and near-infrared, crucial for exoplanet detection around cool stars, demonstrated with CRIRES+ data reaching 3 m/s accuracy.

Contribution

viper is a publicly available, user-friendly pipeline extended to process NIR data, incorporating telluric modeling to improve RV precision, especially in the K band.

Findings

Achieved 3 m/s RV accuracy in the NIR over 2.5 years with a gas cell.

Demonstrated long-term RV stability of around 10 m/s using telluric lines.

Extended viper's capabilities from optical to NIR spectrograph data.

Abstract

In recent years, a number of new instruments and data reduction pipelines have been developed to obtain high-precision radial velocities (RVs). In particular in the optical, considerable progress has been made and RV precision below 50 cm/s has been reached. Yet, the RV precision in the near-infrared (NIR) is trailing behind. This is due to a number of factors, such as imprinted atmospheric absorption lines, lower stellar information content, different types of detectors, and usable calibration lamps. However, observations in the NIR are important for the search and study of exoplanets around cool low-mass stars that are faint at optical wavelengths. Not only are M dwarfs brightest in the NIR, the signal of stellar activity is also reduced at longer wavelengths. In this paper we introduce the RV pipeline viper (Velocity and IP EstimatoR). The philosophy of viper is to offer a publicly available and user-friendly code that is able to process data from various spectrographs. Originally designed to handle data from optical instruments, the code now has been extended to enable the processing of NIR data. viper uses a least-square fitting to model the stellar RV as well as the temporal and spatial variable IP. We have improved upon this method by adding a term for the telluric spectrum that enables the forward modelling of molecules present in the Earth's atmosphere. In this paper we use CRIRES+ observations in the K band to demonstrate viper's ability to handle data in the NIR. We show that it is possible to achieve an RV accuracy of 3 m/s over a period of 2.5 years with the use of a gas cell. Additionally, we present a study of the stability of atmospheric lines in the NIR. With viper it is possible to handle data taken with or without a gas cell, and we show that a long-term RV precision of around 10 m/s can be achieved when using only telluric lines for the wavelength calibration.