Issue |
A&A
Volume 642, October 2020
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A157 | |
Number of page(s) | 31 | |
Section | Planets and planetary systems | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202038376 | |
Published online | 15 October 2020 |
The effects of granulation and supergranulation on Earth-mass planet detectability in the habitable zone around F6-K4 stars
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG,
38000
Grenoble, France
e-mail: nadege.meunier@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
Received:
8
May
2020
Accepted:
13
August
2020
Context. The detectability of exoplanets and the determination of their projected mass in radial velocity are affected by stellar magnetic activity and photospheric dynamics. Among those processes, the effect of granulation, and even more so of supergranulation, has been shown to be significant in the solar case. The impact for other spectral types has not yet been characterised.
Aims. Our study is aimed at quantifying the impact of these flows for other stars and estimating how such contributions affect their performance.
Methods. We analysed a broad array of extended synthetic time series that model these processes to characterise the impact of these flows on exoplanet detection for main sequence stars with spectral types from F6 to K4. We focussed on Earth-mass planets orbiting within the habitable zone around those stars. We estimated the expected detection rates and detection limits, tested the tools that are typically applied to such observations, and performed blind tests.
Results. We find that both granulation and supergranulation on these stars significantly affect planet mass characterisation in radial velocity when performing a follow-up of a transit detection: the uncertainties on these masses are sometimes below 20% for a 1 MEarth (for granulation alone or for low-mass stars), but they are much larger in other configurations (supergranulation, high-mass stars). For granulation and low levels of supergranulation, the detection rates are good for K and late G stars (if the number of points is large enough), but poor for more massive stars. The highest level of supergranulation leads to a very poor performance, even for K stars; this is both due to low detection rates and to high levels of false positives, even for a very dense temporal sampling over 10 yr. False positive levels estimated from standard false alarm probabilities sometimes significantly overestimate or underestimate the true level, depending on the number of points: it is, therefore, crucial to take this effect into account when analysing observations.
Conclusions. We conclude that granulation and supergranulation significantly affect the performance of exoplanet detectability. Future works will focus on improving the following three aspects: decreasing the number of false positives, increasing detection rates, and improving the false alarm probability estimations from observations.
Key words: convection / techniques: radial velocities / stars: activity / stars: solar-type / Sun: granulation / planetary systems
© N. Meunier and A.-M. Lagrange 2020
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.