scholarly journals Three years of Sun-as-a-star radial-velocity observations on the approach to solar minimum

2019 ◽  
Vol 487 (1) ◽  
pp. 1082-1100 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Collier Cameron ◽  
A Mortier ◽  
D Phillips ◽  
X Dumusque ◽  
R D Haywood ◽  
...  

Abstract The time-variable velocity fields of solar-type stars limit the precision of radial-velocity determinations of their planets’ masses, obstructing detection of Earth twins. Since 2015 July, we have been monitoring disc-integrated sunlight in daytime using a purpose-built solar telescope and fibre feed to the HARPS-N stellar radial-velocity spectrometer. We present and analyse the solar radial-velocity measurements and cross-correlation function (CCF) parameters obtained in the first 3 yr of observation, interpreting them in the context of spatially resolved solar observations. We describe a Bayesian mixture-model approach to automated data-quality monitoring. We provide dynamical and daily differential-extinction corrections to place the radial velocities in the heliocentric reference frame, and the CCF shape parameters in the sidereal frame. We achieve a photon-noise-limited radial-velocity precision better than 0.43 m s−1 per 5-min observation. The day-to-day precision is limited by zero-point calibration uncertainty with an RMS scatter of about 0.4 m s−1. We find significant signals from granulation and solar activity. Within a day, granulation noise dominates, with an amplitude of about 0.4 m s−1 and an autocorrelation half-life of 15 min. On longer time-scales, activity dominates. Sunspot groups broaden the CCF as they cross the solar disc. Facular regions temporarily reduce the intrinsic asymmetry of the CCF. The radial-velocity increase that accompanies an active-region passage has a typical amplitude of 5 m s−1 and is correlated with the line asymmetry, but leads it by 3 d. Spectral line-shape variability thus shows promise as a proxy for recovering the true radial velocity.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sierra N. Merkes ◽  
Scotland Leman ◽  
Eric Smith ◽  
Aaron Defreitas ◽  
William N. Alexander ◽  
...  

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (S276) ◽  
pp. 527-529
Author(s):  
Xavier Dumusque ◽  
Nuno C. Santos ◽  
Stéphane Udry ◽  
Cristophe Lovis ◽  
Xavier Bonfils

AbstractSpectrographs like HARPS can now reach a sub-ms−1 precision in radial-velocity (RV) (Pepe & Lovis 2008). At this level of accuracy, we start to be confronted with stellar noise produced by 3 different physical phenomena: oscillations, granulation phenomena (granulation, meso- and super-granulation) and activity. On solar type stars, these 3 types of perturbation can induce ms−1 RV variation, but on different time scales: 3 to 15 minutes for oscillations, 15 minutes to 1.5 days for granulation phenomena and 10 to 50 days for activity. The high precision observational strategy used on HARPS, 1 measure per night of 15 minutes, on 10 consecutive days each month, is optimized, due to a long exposure time, to average out the noise coming from oscillations (Dumusque et al. 2011a) but not to reduce the noise coming from granulation and activity (Dumusque et al. 2011a and Dumusque et al. 2011b). The smallest planets found with this strategy (Mayor et al. 2009) seems to be at the limit of the actual observational strategy and not at the limit of the instrumental precision. To be able to find Earth mass planets in the habitable zone of solar-type stars (200 days for a K0 dwarf), new observational strategies, averaging out simultaneously all type of stellar noise, are required.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Huandong Wang ◽  
Yong Li ◽  
Mu Du ◽  
Zhenhui Li ◽  
Depeng Jin

Both app developers and service providers have strong motivations to understand when and where certain apps are used by users. However, it has been a challenging problem due to the highly skewed and noisy app usage data. Moreover, apps are regarded as independent items in existing studies, which fail to capture the hidden semantics in app usage traces. In this article, we propose App2Vec, a powerful representation learning model to learn the semantic embedding of apps with the consideration of spatio-temporal context. Based on the obtained semantic embeddings, we develop a probabilistic model based on the Bayesian mixture model and Dirichlet process to capture when , where , and what semantics of apps are used to predict the future usage. We evaluate our model using two different app usage datasets, which involve over 1.7 million users and 2,000+ apps. Evaluation results show that our proposed App2Vec algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in app usage prediction with a performance gap of over 17.0%.


2020 ◽  
Vol 643 ◽  
pp. A115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Breuval ◽  
Pierre Kervella ◽  
Richard I. Anderson ◽  
Adam G. Riess ◽  
Frédéric Arenou ◽  
...  

Aims. Classical Cepheids provide the foundation for the empirical extragalactic distance ladder. Milky Way Cepheids are the only stars in this class accessible to trigonometric parallax measurements. However, the parallaxes of Cepheids from the second Gaia data release (GDR2) are affected by systematics because of the absence of chromaticity correction, and occasionally by saturation. Methods. As a proxy for the parallaxes of 36 Galactic Cepheids, we adopt either the GDR2 parallaxes of their spatially resolved companions or the GDR2 parallax of their host open cluster. This novel approach allows us to bypass the systematics on the GDR2 Cepheids parallaxes that is induced by saturation and variability. We adopt a GDR2 parallax zero-point (ZP) of −0.046 mas with an uncertainty of 0.015 mas that covers most of the recent estimates. Results. We present new Galactic calibrations of the Leavitt law in the V, J, H, KS, and Wesenheit WH bands. We compare our results with previous calibrations based on non-Gaia measurements and compute a revised value for the Hubble constant anchored to Milky Way Cepheids. Conclusions. From an initial Hubble constant of 76.18 ± 2.37 km s−1 Mpc−1 based on parallax measurements without Gaia, we derive a revised value by adopting companion and average cluster parallaxes in place of direct Cepheid parallaxes, and we find H0 = 72.8 ± 1.9 (statistical + systematics) ±1.9 (ZP) km s−1 Mpc−1 when all Cepheids are considered and H0 = 73.0 ± 1.9 (statistical + systematics) ±1.9 (ZP) km s−1 Mpc−1 for fundamental mode pulsators only.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Jian-Ping Xiong ◽  
Bo Zhang ◽  
Chao Liu ◽  
Jiao Li ◽  
Yong-Heng Zhao ◽  
...  

Abstract The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) started a median-resolution spectroscopic (MRS, R ∼7500) survey since October 2018. The main scientific goals of MRS, including binary stars, pulsators and other variable stars, were launched with a time-domain spectroscopic survey. However, the systematic errors, including the bias induced from wavelength calibration and the systematic difference between different spectrographs, have to be carefully considered during radial velocity measurement. In this work, we provide a technique to correct the systematics in the wavelength calibration based on the relative radial velocity measurements from LAMOST MRS spectra. We show that, for the stars with multi-epoch spectra, the systematic bias which is induced from the exposures on different nights can be corrected well for LAMOST MRS in each spectrograph. In addition, the precision of radial velocity zero-point of multi-epoch time-domain observations reaches below 0.5 km s−1. As a by-product, we also give the constant star candidates**, which can be the secondary radial-velocity standard star candidates of LAMOST MRS time-domain surveys.


2019 ◽  
Vol 490 (1) ◽  
pp. 502-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
A L Wallace ◽  
M J Ireland

ABSTRACT Giant planets are expected to form at orbital radii that are relatively large compared to transit and radial velocity detections (>1 au). As a result, giant planet formation is best observed through direct imaging. By simulating the formation of giant (0.3–5MJ) planets by core accretion, we predict planet magnitude in the near-infrared (2–4 μm) and demonstrate that, once a planet reaches the runaway accretion phase, it is self-luminous and is bright enough to be detected in near-infrared wavelengths. Using planet distribution models consistent with existing radial velocity and imaging constraints, we simulate a large sample of systems with the same stellar and disc properties to determine how many planets can be detected. We find that current large (8–10 m) telescopes have at most a 0.2 per cent chance of detecting a core-accretion giant planet in the L’ band and 2 per cent in the K band for a typical solar-type star. Future instruments such as METIS and VIKiNG have higher sensitivity and are expected to detect exoplanets at a maximum rate of 2 and 8 per cent, respectively.


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