A Gaussian process framework for modelling stellar activity signals in radial velocity data
By Vinesh Rajpaul, Suzanne Aigrain, Michael A. Osborne, Steven Reece, Stephen J. Roberts. 2015
219 citations recorded by the source corpus.
To date, the radial velocity (RV) method has been one of the most productive techniques for detecting and confirming extrasolar planetary candidates. Unfortunately, stellar activity can induce RV variations which can drown out or even mimic planetary signals - and it is notoriously difficult to model and thus mitigate the effects of these activity-induced nuisance signals. This is expected to be a major obstacle to using next-generation spectrographs to detect lower mass planets, planets with longer periods, and planets around more active stars. Enter Gaussian processes (GPs) which, we note, have a number of attractive features that make them very well suited to disentangling stellar activity signals from planetary signals. We present here a GP framework we developed to model RV time series jointly with ancillary activity indicators (e.g. bisector velocity spans, line widths, chromospheric activity indices), allowing the activity component of RV time series to be constrained and disentangled from e.g. planetary components. We discuss the mathematical details of our GP framework, and present results illustrating its encouraging performance on both synthetic and real RV datasets, including the publicly-available Alpha Centauri B dataset.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b5bd1477df786bce21b6fbf2d8ccaef0319115c
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In Artificial Intelligence
- Timothy Morton
- Daniel Foreman-Mackey
- Vinesh Rajpaul
- Suzanne Aigrain
- R. Angus
- P. McMillan
- E. Thrane
- Colm Talbot
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Daniel Foreman-Mackey
- Timothy Morton
- R. Angus
- Suzanne Aigrain
- Vinesh Rajpaul
- J. Johnson
- D. Charbonneau
- David W. Hogg
Citations in the corpus
- Inferring probabilistic stellar rotation periods using Gaussian processes (2017, background): “More recently, GPs have been used in the stellar and exoplanet fields within astronomy, to capture stellar variability or instrumental systematics (see e.g. Gibson et al. 2012; Haywood et al. 2014; Dawson et al. 2014; Barclay et al. 2015; Haywood 2015; Evans et al. 2015; Rajpaul et al. 2015; Czekala”