Leveraging Precise Photometry From Kepler and TESS to Extract Exoplanets from Radial Velocity Time Series

Stellar activity contamination of radial velocity (RV) data is one of the top challenges plaguing the field of extreme precision RV (EPRV) science. Previous work has shown that photometry can be very effective at removing such signals from RV data, especially stellar activity caused by rotating star spots and this http URL exact utility of photometry for removing RV activity contamination, and the best way to apply it, is not well known. We present a combination photometric and RV study of eight Kepler/K2 FGK stars with known stellar variability.

We use NEID RVs acquired simultaneously with TESS photometry, and we perform injection recovery tests to quantify the efficacy of recent TESS photometry versus archival Kepler/K2 photometry for removing stellar variability from RVs.

We additionally experiment with different TESS sectors when training our models in order to quantify the real benefit of simultaneously acquired RVs and photometry. We conclude that Kepler photometry typically performs better than TESS at removing noise from RV data when it is available, likely due to longer baseline and precision.

In contrast, for targets with available K2 photometry, especially those most active, and with high precision (σNEID < 1 m s−1) NEID RVs, TESS may be the more informative dataset. However, contrary to expectations, we have found that training on simultaneous photometry does not always achieve the best results.

NEID observations of our eight targets. TESS observations are overlaid in blue. Bad weather hindered observations of Kepler targets at first, and the Contreras fire would eventually prevent observations toward the end of our program, hence the small window of TESS observations which then ended abruptly for the Kepler targets. We generally had high success observing K2 targets.– astro-ph.EP

Corey Beard, Paul Robertson, Jack Lubin, Te Han, Rae Holcomb, Pranav Premnath, R. Paul Butler, Paul A. Dalba, Brad Holden, Cullen H. Blake, Scott A. Diddams, Arvind F. Gupta, Samuel Halverson, Daniel M. Krolikowski, Dan Li, Andrea S.J. Lin, Sarah E. Logsdon, Emily Lubar, Suvrath Mahadevan, Michael W. McElwain, Joe P. Ninan, Leonardo A. Paredes, Arpita Roy, Christian Schwab, Gudmundur Stefansson, Ryan C. Terrien, Jason T. Wright

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2412.11329 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2412.11329v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.11329
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Submission history
From: Corey Beard
[v1] Sun, 15 Dec 2024 22:17:33 UTC (10,639 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11329
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