2019-10-04

mitigating p-modes in EPRV

Megan Bedell (Flatiron) and I continued our work from earlier this week on making a mechanical model of stellar asteroseismic p-modes as damped harmonic oscillators driven by white noise. Because the model is so close to closed-form (it is closed form between kicks, and the kicks are regular and of random amplitude), the code is extremely fast. In a couple minutes we can simulate a realistic, multi-year, dense, space-based observing campaign with a full forest of asteroseismic modes.

The first thing we did with our model is check the results of the recent paper on p-mode mitigation by Chaplin et al, which suggest that you can obtain mitigation of p-mode noise in precision radial-velocity observation campaigns by good choice of exposure time. We expected, at the outset, that the results of this paper are too optimistic: We expected that a fixed exposure time would not do a good job all the time, given the stochastic nature of the driving of the modes, and that there are many modes in a frequency window around the strongest modes. But we were wrong and the Chaplin et al paper is correct! Which is good.

However, we believe that we can do better than exposure-time-tuning for p-mode mitigation. We believe that we can fit the p-modes with the (possibly non-stationary) integral of a stationary Gaussian process, tuned to the spectrum. That's our next job.

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