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Published July 23, 2021 | Version v1
Poster Open

iSHELL PRV Follow-up of TESS Candidates

  • 1. Department of Physics & Astronomy, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive MS 3F3, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA

Description

We present our program of obtaining precise near infrared (NIR) radial velocities (RVs) with the R ~ 80,000 iSHELL spectrograph on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) using a methane isotopolgue absorption gas cell in the calibration unit. Observing cool low mass stars provides a “Habitable Zone'' shortcut through their lower mass, effective temperature, and larger reflex velocities from orbiting bodies. It is advantageous to observe these stars at NIR wavelengths where they emit the bulk of their bolometric luminosity and are most quiescent from rotationally modulated stellar activity. Our RV pipeline (pychell) extracts RVs by forward modeling the observed spectra, where the stellar template is derived iteratively using the target observations themselves through averaging barycenter-shifted residuals. With iSHELL, we have aided in the confirmation of seven TOI systems (K and M dwarfs) with notably small semi-amplitudes [3-15 m/s]. We further highlight results from our multi-year monitoring of AU Mic with a variety of facilities (incl. iSHELL) where we are able to robustly detect planets with semi-amplitudes more than an order of magnitude below the stellar-activity level. 

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TESS_Science_Conference_2.pdf

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