The broad objectives of this Work Package are to:

1) Understand the effects that astrophysical noise such as star spots, granulation, suppression of convective blueshift, and other manifestations of stellar activity has on the radial velocity follow-up of planet candidates discovered by PLATO - especially for low mass (terrestrial) planets.

2) Develop and outline mitigation procedures, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the PLATO ground-based follow-up mission and broadening its span.

A list of current and past Work Package members can be found towards the bottom of this page.

Recent Activities

13th September 2022: Extreme Precision Radial Velocity discussion session at the UK Exoplanet Conference (led by Annelies Mortier & Heather Cegla).

5th July 2022: Coolstars 21 (Toulouse) Splinter session 5 "Characterising stellar variability in the era of extreme radial velocity surveys of low-mass planets orbiting F-M stars". This splinter session arose from work done by this WP during an ISSI meeting, and was led by Nadège Meunier. Originally scheduled for June 2020, this was delayed due to Covid.

Past Activities

The first "Know thy star, know thy planet" ISSI workshop (Team Lead: Chris Watson) was held in Bern from December 10th to 14th, 2018, followed by another from 9th to 13th September 2019. A review of the state-of the-art astrophysical noise mitigation methods is underway - but was delayed due to the covid pandemic. The web-page for these activities can be found via:

http://www.issibern.ch/teams/earthlikeworld/index.php/meetings/

Work Package members (being updated)

• Prof. Chris Watson (WP Manager); Queen's University Belfast, UK
• Dr Heather Cegla; University of Warwick, UK
• Prof. Andrew Collier Cameron; University of St. Andrews, UK
• Mr. Joäo Comacho; Universidade do Porto, Portugal
• Dr Jean Costes; Laboratoire d Astrophysique de Marseille, France
• Dr Shweta Dalal; University of Exeter, UK
• Dr Lauren Doyle; University of Warwick, UK
• Dr Xavier Dumusque; Observatoire de Geneve, Switzerland
• Dr João Faria; Universidade do Porto, Portugal
• Dr Pedro Figueira; Universidade do Porto, Portugal
• Dr Raphaëlle Haywood, University of Exeter, UK
• Dr Monica Lendl; Observatoire de Geneve, Switzerland
• Dr Luca Malavolta; University of Padova, Italy
• Prof. Nadège Meunier; University of Grenoble, France
• Dr Annelies Mortier; Birmingham University, UK
• Prof Ansgar Reiners; Georg-August-Universität, Germany.
• Dr Katja Poppenhaeger; AIP Potsdam, Germany

Former Members

• Dr Andrew Thompson; Queen's University Belfast, UK
• Dr Mahmoud Oshagh; IAC, Spain

Publications relevant to WP 115-100. WP members highlighted:

1) Booth, Poppenhaegar, Watson et al., 2017, MNRAS, accepted. "An Improved Age-Activity Relationship for Cool Stars older than a Gigayear".

2) Thompson, Watson, et al., 2017, MNRAS Letter, 468L, 16. "The changing face of α Centauri B: probing plage and stellar activity in K-dwarfs".

3) Oshagh et al. (also includes Cegla, Dumusque, Faria, Figueria, Watson), 2017, A&A, in press. "Understanding stellar activity-induced radial velocity jitter using simultaneous K2 photometry and HARPS RV measurements".