J/AJ/162/61  Radial velocity follow up of Barnard's star with HPF (Lubin+, 2021)

Stellar activity manifesting at a one-year alias explains Barnard b as a false positive. Lubin J., Robertson P., Stefansson G., Ninan J., Mahadevan S., Endl M., Ford E., Wright J.T., Beard C., Bender C., Cochran W.D., Diddams S.A., Fredrick C., Halverson S., Kanodia S., Metcalf A.J., Ramsey L., Roy A., Schwab C., Terrien R. <Astron. J., 162, 61-61 (2021)> =2021AJ....162...61L 2021AJ....162...61L (SIMBAD/NED BibCode)
ADC_Keywords: Exoplanets; Stars, M-type; Radial velocities; Spectra, infrared Keywords: Exoplanet astronomy; Stellar activity Abstract: Barnard's star is among the most studied stars given its proximity to the Sun. It is often considered the radial velocity (RV) standard for fully convective stars due to its RV stability and equatorial decl. Recently, an Msini=3.3M⊕ super-Earth planet candidate with a 233day orbital period was announced by Ribas et al. New observations from the near-infrared Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) Doppler spectrometer do not show this planetary signal. We ran a suite of experiments on both the original data and a combined original + HPF data set. These experiments include model comparisons, periodogram analyses, and sampling sensitivity, all of which show the signal at the proposed period of 233days is transitory in nature. The power in the signal is largely contained within 211 RVs that were taken within a 1000 day span of observing. Our preferred model of the system is one that features stellar activity without a planet. We propose that the candidate planetary signal is an alias of the 145day rotation period. This result highlights the challenge of analyzing long-term, quasi-periodic activity signals over multiyear and multi-instrument observing campaigns. Description: Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) is a high-resolution (R∼55000) NIR spectrograph on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), covering the Doppler-information-rich z, Y, and J bands from 810 to 1280nm. HPF has an NIR laser-frequency comb (LFC) calibrator, which has been shown to enable ∼20cm/s calibration precision in 10minute bins and 1.53m/s RV precision on-sky on Barnard's star over an 3 month baseline. In this paper, we extend this baseline to 856 days. Objects: ---------------------------------------------------------------- RA (2000) DE Designation(s) (Period) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 17 57 48.50 +04 41 36.1 GJ699 = NAME Barnard's star (P=233d) ---------------------------------------------------------------- File Summary: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FileName Lrecl Records Explanations -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ReadMe 80 . This file table1.dat 31 118 HPF RV measurements of Barnard's Star -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- See also: I/347 : Distances to 1.33 billion stars in Gaia DR2 (Bailer-Jones+, 2018) J/ApJS/200/15 : HARPS-TERRA project. I. (Anglada-Escude+, 2012) J/A+A/557/L10 : Rotation periods of 12000 Kepler stars (Nielsen+, 2013) J/ApJ/764/131 : Long-term monitoring of Barnard's star velocity (Choi+, 2013) J/A+A/566/A66 : Correlation logR'HK with logIHα (Gomes da Silva+, 2014) J/ApJS/211/24 : Rotation periods of Kepler MS stars (McQuillan+, 2014) J/ApJ/807/45 : Potentially habitable planets orbit. M dwarfs (Dressing+, 2015) J/ApJ/821/93 : Rotation & Galactic kinematics of mid M dwarfs (Newton+, 2016) J/MNRAS/472/1618 : Kepler study of starspot lifetimes (Giles+, 2017) J/MNRAS/474/2094 : Inferring probabilistic stellar rotat. per. (Angus+, 2018) J/other/Nat/563.365 : Barnard's star radial velocity curve (Ribas+, 2018) J/MNRAS/484/L8 : Correcting HIRES/Keck RVs systematic errors (Tal-Or+, 2019) J/A+A/636/A74 : HARPS radial velocity database (Trifonov+, 2020) J/A+A/639/A77 : Proxima Cen RV, FWHM and fluxes (Suarez Mascareno+, 2020) J/AJ/159/100 : Flux & RVs of the dwarf G9-40 with K2 & HPF (Stefansson+, 2020) J/A+A/649/A6 : Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars -GCNS (Gaia collaboration, 2021) Byte-by-byte Description of file: table1.dat -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bytes Format Units Label Explanations -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1- 13 F13.5 d BJD [2458234/2459092] Barycentric Julian Date 15- 20 F6.3 m/s RVel [-7.55/3.9] Radial velocity 22- 26 F5.3 m/s e_RVel [0.6/4] Uncertainty in RVel 28- 31 A4 --- Split Split code (1) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note (1): The HPF data is designated as "pre" or "post" with respect to the planned instrument thermal cycle of August 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- History: From electronic version of the journal
(End) Prepared by [AAS], Coralie Fix [CDS], 18-Nov-2021
The document above follows the rules of the Standard Description for Astronomical Catalogues; from this documentation it is possible to generate f77 program to load files into arrays or line by line