Impact des raies d'absorption telluriques sur la vélocimétrie de haute précision
In the search for an exoplanet like Earth in the habitable zone of its star, radial velocimetry has proved itself an important tool. The most promising candidates for this type of measurements are red dwarfs. Since their habitable zone is very close to the star with relatively small orbital periods (a few weeks), and because of their small masses, the presence of an Earth-like planet in their habitable zone would produce a signal of ∼ 1 ms−1. Such a small Doppler effect resulting from this reflex motion is within the capabilities of precision radial velocity instruments. But, since red dwarfs emit mostly in the infrared and Earth’s atmosphere has strong absorption lines in that domain, the removal of telluric absorption lines is crucial to minimize the velocity bias induced by the atmosphere. The goal of this work was the development of an algorithm capable of performing high precision radial velocimetry measurements, to quantify the impact of telluric lines on the measurements and to determine the level of telluric line masking and attenuation needed to minimize their impact on velocity measurements. A data processing method based on the analysis of an adequately weighted segmented spectrum was also developed to optimally extract radial velocities in the presence of residual telluric lines. We note the existence of a correlation between the time of the measurements and the radial velocity uncertainty associated with the residual telluric lines, which underlines the importance of the choice of the observation window to achieve an accuracy of 1 meter per second. From this analysis, it is concluded that a mask of 80% transmission coupled with an attenuation leaving a maximum of 10% of the telluric lines is required to achieve performance better than 1 meter per second.
Instrumentation SPIRou High-precision velocimetry Exoplanets Radial velocity Error measurement Telluric lines Data reduction and analysis