Seminars at FGG
Putting exoplanets in the stellar context: the case of tau Bootis
Speaker: Francesco Borsa (Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera)
Date and time: 2015-05-26 12:30
We observed the tau Boo system with the HARPS-N spectrograph to test a new observational strategy aimed at jointly studying asteroseismology, the planetary orbit, and star-planet magnetic interaction. We collected high-cadence observations on 11 nearly consecutive nights and for each night averaged the raw FITS files using a dedicated software. In this way we obtained spectra with a high signal-to-noise ratio, used to study the variation of the CaII H&K lines and to have radial velocity values free from stellar oscillations, without losing the oscillations information. We updated the planetary ephemeris and showed the acceleration caused by the stellar binary companion. Our results on the stellar activity variation suggest the presence of a high-latitude plage during the time span of our observations. The correlation between the chromospheric activity and the planetary orbital phase remains unclear. Solar-like oscillations are detected in the radial velocity time series: we estimated asteroseismic quantities and found that they agree well with theoretical predictions.