The Epoch of Giant Planet Migration Planet Search Program. I. Near-infrared Radial Velocity Jitter of Young Sun-like Stars
- Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, 2515 Speedway, Stop C1400, Austin, TX 78712 (United States)
- Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, 4 Ivy Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, 525 Davey Lab, University Park, PA 16802 (United States)
- Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, 933 N. Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721 (United States)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
- The Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
We present early results from the Epoch of Giant Planet Migration program, a precise radial velocity (RV) survey of more than 100 intermediate-age (∼20–200 Myr) G and K dwarfs with the Habitable Zone Planet Finder spectrograph (HPF) at McDonald Observatory’s Hobby–Eberly Telescope. The goals of this program are to determine the timescale and dominant physical mechanism of giant planet migration interior to the water ice line of Sun-like stars. Here, we summarize results from the first 14 months of this program, with a focus on our custom RV pipeline for HPF, a measurement of the intrinsic near-infrared RV activity of young Solar analogs, and modeling the underlying population-level distribution of stellar jitter. We demonstrate on-sky stability at the sub-2 m s{sup −1} level for the K2 standard HD 3765 using a least-squares matching method to extract precise RVs. Based on a subsample of 29 stars with at least three RV measurements from our program, we find a median rms level of 34 m s{sup −1}. This is nearly a factor of 2 lower than the median rms level in the optical of 60 m s{sup −1} for a comparison sample with similar ages and spectral types as our targets. The observed near-infrared jitter measurements for this subsample are well reproduced with a log-normal parent distribution with μ = 4.15 and σ = 1.02. Finally, by compiling rms values from previous planet search programs, we show that near-infrared jitter for G and K dwarfs generally decays with age in a similar fashion to optical wavelengths, albeit with a shallower slope and lower overall values for ages ≲1 Gyr.
- OSTI ID:
- 23159180
- Journal Information:
- The Astronomical Journal (Online), Vol. 161, Issue 4; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1538-3881
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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