English

Simulated mass measurements of the young planet K2-33b

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2020-01-22 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

In this paper, we carry out simulations of radial velocity (RV) measurements of the mass of the 8-11 Myr Neptune-sized planet K2-33b using high-precision near infrared velocimeters like SPIRou at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We generate a RV curve containing a planet signature and a realistic stellar activity signal, computed for a central wavelength of 1.8 μ\mum and statistically compatible with the light-curve obtained with K2. The modelled activity signal includes the effect of time-evolving dark and bright surface features hosting a 2 kG radial magnetic field, resulting in a RV signal of semi-amplitude ~30 m/s. Assuming a 3-month visibility window, we build RV time-series including Gaussian white noise from which we retrieve the planet mass while filtering the stellar activity signal using Gaussian Process Regression. We find that 35/50 visits spread over 3 consecutive bright-time runs on K2-33 allow one to reliably detect planet RV signatures of respectively 10 and 5 m/s at precisions larger than 3 σ\sigma. We also show that 30 visits may end up being insufficient in some cases to provide a good coverage of the stellar rotation cycle, with the result that the planet signature can go undetected or the mass estimation be plagued by large errors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.04304,
  title  = {Simulated mass measurements of the young planet K2-33b},
  author = {Baptiste Klein and Jean-François Donati},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.04304},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Letter accepted in MNRAS, 6 pages, 3 figures