Scientific Seminars

The needle in the haystack: disentangling planetary and stellar activity signals in RV time series

Oscar Barragan-Villanueva
University of Oxford

2021-07-22    11:00    Merate - Sala Virtuale - https://meet.google.com/imu-ibbn-cct

The Radial Velocity (RV) method gave us the first detection of an exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star. Since then, a plethora of new and better instruments have allowed us to discover/confirm hundreds of exoplanets by measuring the stellar wobble caused by its guest worlds. However, the RV detection of extrasolar planets is hindered by the intrinsic magnetic activity of the host stars. Active regions on stellar surfaces give rise to quasi-periodic variations in the apparent stellar RV, which can be very difficult to disentangle from the planetary signal. Fortunately, this situation improves if we combine the RV data with stellar observables. In this talk, I will present state-of-the-art methods to disentangle planetary and stellar activity signals by using diverse stellar observables together with a multi-dimensional Gaussian Process approach. I will show how such methods are extremely useful to extract planet signals in most cases, such as planets orbiting active stars.