Uncovering the planets and stellar activity of CoRoT-7 using only radial velocities

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2016

Authors

Faria, JP (Author) Other; Haywood, RD (Author) Other; Brewer, BJ (Author) Other; Figueira, P (Author) Other; Oshagh, M (Author) Other; Santerne, A (Author) Other; N.C. Santos (Author) FCUP

Journal

Title: Astronomy and Astrophysics

Vol. 588

Final page: A31

ISSN: 0004-6361

Publisher: EDP Sciences

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 59 Citations

Scopus - 65 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00K-B81

DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201527899

Abstract (EN): Stellar activity can induce signals in the radial velocities of stars, complicating the detection of orbiting low-mass planets. We present a method to determine the number of planetary signals present in radial-velocity datasets of active stars, using only radial-velocity observations. Instead of considering separate fits with different number of planets, we use a birth-death Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to infer the posterior distribution for the number of planets in a single run. In a natural way, the marginal distributions for the orbital parameters of all planets are also inferred. This method is applied to HARPS data of CoRoT-7. We confidently recover the orbits of both CoRoT-7b and CoRoT-7c although the data show evidence for the presence of additional signals.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 7