TY - JOUR
T1 - Revisiting ϵ Eridani with NEID
T2 - identifying new activity-sensitive lines in a young K dwarf star
AU - Jiang, Sarah
AU - Roy, Arpita
AU - Halverson, Samuel
AU - Bender, Chad F.
AU - Selgas, Carlos
AU - Otor, O. Justin
AU - Mahadevan, Suvrath
AU - Stefánsson, Guđmundur
AU - Terrien, Ryan C.
AU - Schwab, Christian
N1 - © 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.
PY - 2024/1/1
Y1 - 2024/1/1
N2 - Recent improvements in the sensitivity and precision of the radial velocity (RV) method for exoplanets have brought it close, but not quite to, the threshold (∼10 cm s−1) required to detect Earth-mass and other potentially habitable planets around Sun-like stars. Stellar activity-driven noise in RV measurements remains a significant hurdle to achieving this goal. While various efforts have been made to disentangle this noise from real planetary signals, a greater understanding of the relationship between spectra and stellar activity is crucial to informing stellar activity mitigation. We use a partially automated method to analyze spectral lines in a set of observations of the young, active star ϵ Eridani from the high-precision spectrograph NEID, correlate their features (depth, FWHM, and integrated flux) with known activity indicators, and filter and curate for well-defined lines whose shape changes are sensitive to certain types of stellar activity. We then present a list of nine lines correlated with the S-index in all three line features, including four newly identified activity-sensitive lines, as well as additional lines correlated with the S-index in at least one feature, and discuss the possible implications of the behavior observed in these lines. Our line lists represent a step forward in the empirical understanding of the complex relationships between stellar activity and spectra and illustrate the importance of studying the time evolution of line morphologies with stabilized spectrographs in the overall effort to mitigate activity in the search for small, potentially Earth-like exoplanets.
AB - Recent improvements in the sensitivity and precision of the radial velocity (RV) method for exoplanets have brought it close, but not quite to, the threshold (∼10 cm s−1) required to detect Earth-mass and other potentially habitable planets around Sun-like stars. Stellar activity-driven noise in RV measurements remains a significant hurdle to achieving this goal. While various efforts have been made to disentangle this noise from real planetary signals, a greater understanding of the relationship between spectra and stellar activity is crucial to informing stellar activity mitigation. We use a partially automated method to analyze spectral lines in a set of observations of the young, active star ϵ Eridani from the high-precision spectrograph NEID, correlate their features (depth, FWHM, and integrated flux) with known activity indicators, and filter and curate for well-defined lines whose shape changes are sensitive to certain types of stellar activity. We then present a list of nine lines correlated with the S-index in all three line features, including four newly identified activity-sensitive lines, as well as additional lines correlated with the S-index in at least one feature, and discuss the possible implications of the behavior observed in these lines. Our line lists represent a step forward in the empirical understanding of the complex relationships between stellar activity and spectra and illustrate the importance of studying the time evolution of line morphologies with stabilized spectrographs in the overall effort to mitigate activity in the search for small, potentially Earth-like exoplanets.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85180082674&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3847/1538-3881/ad0b0b
DO - 10.3847/1538-3881/ad0b0b
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85180082674
SN - 0004-6256
VL - 167
SP - 1
EP - 16
JO - Astronomical Journal
JF - Astronomical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 9
ER -