Related papers: A Hermite-Gaussian Based Radial Velocity Estimatio…
Future generations of precise radial velocity (RV) surveys aim to achieve sensitivity sufficient to detect Earth mass planets orbiting in their stars' habitable zones. A major obstacle to this goal is astrophysical radial velocity noise…
We present a new, simple method to predict activity-induced radial velocity variations using high-precision time-series photometry. It is based on insights from a simple spot model, has only two free parameters (one of which can be…
The successful detection is reported of radial-velocity variations due to orbital motion of the substellar companion of the star tau Bootis, from data obtained with a small aperture (0.4m) telescope and a fibre-fed high-resolution…
In this PhD dissertation, I discuss issues of the Radial Velocities (RV) and transit methods. These techniques allow us to derive the mass and radius of an exoplanet, necessary to model its bulk structure and to have insight on its…
Exoplanets can be detected with various observational techniques. Among them, radial velocity (RV) has the key advantages of revealing the architecture of planetary systems and measuring planetary mass and orbital eccentricities. RV…
Stellar magnetic activity produces time-varying distortions in the photospheric line profiles of solar-type stars. These lead to systematic errors in high-precision radial-velocity measurements, which limit efforts to discover and measure…
Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…
The two most successful methods for exoplanet detection rely on the detection of planetary signals in photometric and radial velocity time-series. This depends on numerical techniques that exploit the synergy between data and theory to…
Transit and radial velocity searches are two techniques for identifying nearby extrasolar planets to Earth that transit bright stars. Identifying a robust sample of these exoplanets around bright stars for detailed atmospheric…
Doppler orbitography uses the Doppler shift in a transmitted signal to determine the orbital parameters of satellites including range and range-rate (or radial velocity). We describe two techniques for atmospheric-limited optical Doppler…
Pipelines of state-of-the-art spectrographs dedicated to planet detection provide, for each exposure, series of Cross-Correlation Functions (CCFs) built with a Binary Mask (BM), and the absolute radial velocity (RV) derived from Gaussian…
The Exoplanet Tracker is a prototype of a new type of fibre-fed instrument for performing high precision relative Doppler measurements to detect extra-solar planets. A combination of Michelson interferometer and medium resolution…
Although instruments for measuring the radial velocities (RVs) of stars now routinely reach sub-meter per second accuracy, the detection of low-mass planets is still very challenging. The rotational modulation and evolution of spots and/or…
Spectra of composite systems (e.g., spectroscopic binaries) contain spatial information that can be retrieved by measuring the radial velocities (i.e., Doppler shifts) of the components in four observations with the slit rotated by 90…
I start by providing an updated summary of the penalized pixel-fitting (pPXF) method, which is used to extract the stellar and gas kinematics, as well as the stellar population of galaxies, via full spectrum fitting. I then focus on the…
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…
To detect Earth-mass planets using the Doppler method, a major obstacle is to differentiate the planetary signal from intrinsic stellar variability (e.g., pulsations, granulation, spots and plages). Convective blueshift, which results from…
By controlling instrumental errors to below 10 cm/s, the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph (EXPRES) allows for a more insightful study of photospheric velocities that can mask weak Keplerian signals. Gaussian Processes (GP) have become a…
Using relative stellar astrometry for the detection of coherent gravitational wave sources is a promising method for the microhertz range, where no dedicated detectors currently exist. Compared to other gravitational wave detection…
Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…