ALBERT

Description: This book is dedicated to all the people interested in the CoRoT mission and the beautiful data that were delivered during its six year duration. Either amateurs, professional, young or senior researchers, they will find treasures not only at the time of this publication but also in the future twenty or thirty years. It presents the data in their final version, explains how they have been obtained, how to handle them, describes the tools necessary to understand them, and where to find them. It also highlights the most striking first results obtained up to now. CoRoT has opened several unexpected directions of research and certainly new ones still to be discovered.

Description: This book is dedicated to all the people interested in the CoRoT mission and the beautiful data that were delivered during its six year duration. Either amateurs, professional, young or senior researchers, they will find treasures not only at the time of this publication but also in the future twenty or thirty years. It presents the data in their final version, explains how they have been obtained, how to handle them, describes the tools necessary to understand them, and where to find them. It also highlights the most striking first results obtained up to now. CoRoT has opened several unexpected directions of research and certainly new ones still to be discovered.

Description: Context. Detecting and characterising exoworlds around very young stars (age ≤10 Myr) are key aspects of exoplanet demographic studies, especially for understanding the mechanisms and timescales of planet formation and migration. Any reliable theory for such physical phenomena requires a robust observational database to be tested. However, detection using the radial velocity method alone can be very challenging because the amplitude of the signals caused by the magnetic activity of such stars can be orders of magnitude larger than those induced even by massive planets. Aims. We observed the very young (~2 Myr) and very active star V830 Tau with the HARPS-N spectrograph between October 2017 and March 2020 to independently confirm and characterise the previously reported hot Jupiter V830 Tau b (Kb = 68 ± 11 m s−1; mb sin ib = 0.57 ± 0.10 MJup; Pb = 4.927 ± 0.008 d). Methods. Because of the observed ~1 km s−1 radial velocity scatter that can clearly be attributed to the magnetic activity of V830 Tau, we analysed radial velocities extracted with different pipelines and modelled them using several state-of-the-art tools. We devised injection-recovery simulations to support our results and characterise our detection limits. The analysis of the radial velocities was aided by a characterisation of the stellar activity using simultaneous photometric and spectroscopic diagnostics. Results. Despite the high quality of our HARPS-N data and the diversity of tests we performed, we were unable to detect the planet V830 Tau b in our data and cannot confirm its existence. Our simulations show that a statistically significant detection of the claimed planetary Doppler signal is very challenging. Conclusions. It is important to continue Doppler searches for planets around young stars, but utmost care must be taken in the attempt to overcome the technical difficulties to be faced in order to achieve their detection and characterisation. This point must be kept in mind when assessing their occurrence rate, formation mechanisms, and migration pathways, especially without evidence of their existence from photometric transits.

Description: Context. The detailed chemical composition of stars is important in many astrophysical fields, among which is the characterisation of exoplanetary systems. Previous studies seem to indicate an anomalous chemical pattern of the youngest stellar population in the solar vicinity that has sub-solar metal content. This can influence various observational relations linking the properties of exoplanets to the characteristics of the host stars, for example the giant planet-metallicity relation. Aims. In this framework, we aim to expand our knowledge of the chemical composition of intermediate-age stars and understand whether these peculiarities are real or related to spectroscopic analysis techniques. Methods. We analysed high-resolution optical and near-infrared spectra of intermediate-age stars (

Description: Context. With the growth of comparative exoplanetology, it is becoming increasingly clear that investigating the relationships between inner and outer planets plays a key role in discriminating between competing formation and evolution models. To do so, it is important to probe the inner region of systems that host long-period giants in search of undetected lower-mass planetary companions. Aims. In this work, we present our results on the K-dwarf star BD-11 4672, which is already known to host a long-period giant planet, as the first output of a subsample of the GAPS programme specifically aimed at assessing the impact of inefficient migration of planets formed beyond the snowline by searching for Neptune-mass and super-Earth planetary companions of known longer-period giants. Methods. We used the high-precision HARPS-N observations of BD-11 4672 in conjunction with time series taken from the literature in order to search for additional inner planetary signals to be fitted using differential evolution Markov chain Monte Carlo. The long-term stability of the new orbital solutions was tested with N-body dynamical simulations. Results. We report the detection of BD-11 4672 c, a new Neptune-mass planet with an orbital period of 74.20−0.08+0.06 d, eccentricity of 0.40−0.15+0.13, semimajor axis of 0.30 ± 0.01 au, and minimum mass 15.37−2.81+2.97 M⊕, orbiting slightly outside the inner edge of the optimistic circumstellar habitable zone. In order to assess its impact on the dynamical stability of the habitable zone, we computed the angular momentum deficit of the system, showing that planet c has a severe negative impact on the stability of possible additional lower-mass temperate planets. The BD-11 4672 system is notable for its architecture, hosting both a long-period giant planet and an inner lower-mass planet, the latter being one of the most eccentric Neptune-mass planets known at similar periods.

Description: We present the results of a blind exercise to test the recoverability of stellar rotation and differential rotation in Kepler light curves. The simulated light curves lasted 1000 d and included activity cycles, Sun-like butterfly patterns, differential rotation and spot evolution. The range of rotation periods, activity levels and spot lifetime were chosen to be representative of the Kepler data of solar-like stars. Of the 1000 simulated light curves, 770 were injected into actual quiescent Kepler light curves to simulate Kepler noise. The test also included five 1000-d segments of the Sun's total irradiance variations at different points in the Sun's activity cycle. Five teams took part in the blind exercise, plus two teams who participated after the content of the light curves had been released. The methods used included Lomb–Scargle periodograms and variants thereof, autocorrelation function and wavelet-based analyses, plus spot modelling to search for differential rotation. The results show that the ‘overall’ period is well recovered for stars exhibiting low and moderate activity levels. Most teams reported values within 10 per cent of the true value in 70 per cent of the cases. There was, however, little correlation between the reported and simulated values of the differential rotation shear, suggesting that differential rotation studies based on full-disc light curves alone need to be treated with caution, at least for solar-type stars. The simulated light curves and associated parameters are available online for the community to test their own methods.

Description: We present the results of our analysis on V1481 Ori (JW 239), a young SB2 in the Orion nebula Cluster with a circumbinary disc accreting on the lower mass component. The analysis is based on high-resolution spectroscopic data and high-quality photometric time series about 20-yr long. Thanks to the spectroscopy, we confirm the binary nature of this system consisting of M3 + M4 components and derive the mass ratio M B / M A = 0.54, a variable luminosity ratio L B / L A = 0.68–0.94, and an orbital period P orb = 4.433 d. The photometric data allowed us to measure the rotation periods of the two components P phot = 4.4351 d and they are found to be synchronized with the orbital period. The simultaneous modelling of V -, I -band, and radial velocity curves in the 2005 season suggests that the variability is dominated by one hotspot on the secondary component covering at least ~3.5 per cent of the stellar surface and about 420 K hotter than the unperturbed photosphere. Such a spot may originate from the material of the circumbinary disc accreting on to the secondary component. We also detect an apparent 6-yr periodic variation in the position of this hotspot, which is inferred from the phase migration of the light-curve maximum, which we interpret as due to either the presence of surface differential rotation as large as 0.065 per cent, a value compatible with the fully convective components, or to a periodic exchange of angular momentum between the disc and the star, which implies a minimum magnetic field strength of 650 G at the stellar surface.

Description: Bright features have been recently discovered by Dawn on Ceres, which extend previous photometric and Space Telescope observations. These features should produce distortions of the line profiles of the reflected solar spectrum and therefore an apparent radial velocity variation modulated by the rotation of the dwarf planet. Here we report on two sequences of observations of Ceres performed in the nights of 2015 July 31, August 26 and 27 by means of the high-precision High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph at the 3.6 m La Silla European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope. The observations revealed a quite complex behaviour which likely combines a radial velocity modulation due to the rotation with an amplitude of ±6 m s –1 and an unexpected diurnal effect. The latter changes imply changes in the albedo of Occator's bright features due to the blaze produced by the exposure to solar radiation. The short-term variability of Ceres’ albedo is on time-scales ranging from hours to months and can both be confirmed and followed by means of dedicated radial velocity observations.

Description: The Sun is the only star whose surface can be directly resolved at high resolution, and therefore constitutes an excellent test case to explore the physical origin of stellar radial-velocity (RV) variability. We present HARPS observations of sunlight scattered off the bright asteroid 4/Vesta, from which we deduced the Sun's activity-driven RV variations. In parallel, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory provided us with simultaneous high spatial resolution magnetograms, Dopplergrams and continuum images of the Sun in the Fe i 6173 Å line. We determine the RV modulation arising from the suppression of granular blueshift in magnetized regions and the flux imbalance induced by dark spots and bright faculae. The rms velocity amplitudes of these contributions are 2.40 and 0.41 m s –1 , respectively, which confirms that the inhibition of convection is the dominant source of activity-induced RV variations at play, in accordance with previous studies. We find the Doppler imbalances of spot and plage regions to be only weakly anticorrelated. Light curves can thus only give incomplete predictions of convective blueshift suppression. We must instead seek proxies that track the plage coverage on the visible stellar hemisphere directly. The chromospheric flux index $R^{\prime }_{HK}$ derived from the HARPS spectra performs poorly in this respect, possibly because of the differences in limb brightening/darkening in the chromosphere and photosphere. We also find that the activity-driven RV variations of the Sun are strongly correlated with its full-disc magnetic flux density, which may become a useful proxy for activity-related RV noise.