Student : BELLOTTI Stefano
Advisor : PETIT Pascal (IRAP), MORIN Julien (LUPM) and HUSSAIN Gaitee (ESA)
Start : April 2020
Group : PS2E
The quest to find and characterise a habitable Earth-like planet has been the main scientific driver of exoplanetary sciences since the first discovery in 1995. Several space missions have been designed for this objective: TESS, CHEOPS, JWST, PLATO, and ARIEL. To accurately characterise an exoplanet, it is necessary to infer its density and therefore to measure its mass by means of the radial velocity (RV) method. Considering the instrumental advancement in terms of precision, the only limitation to this task is the stellar magnetic activity. This phenomenon is known to drown or even mimic the planetary RV signal, hence efficient filtering techniques are required.
My PhD project focuses on the implementation and adaptation of previously developed activity-filtering techniques for application to nIR data from SPIRou. The chromatic behaviour of the stellar activity,as well as its relation to the structure of the stellar magnetic field will be studied in detail to obtain an optimised technique. The results will be subsequently extended in order to be used with nIR spectrographs such as NIRPS.