The Measured Impact of Chromatic Atmospheric Effects on Barycentric Corrections: Results from the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph

Abstract

One source of error in high-precision radial velocity measurements of exoplanet host stars is chromatic change in Earth’s atmospheric transmission during observations. Mitigation of this error requires that the photon-weighted barycentric correction be applied as a function of wavelength across the stellar spectrum. We have designed a system for chromatic photon-weighted barycentric corrections with the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph and present results from the first year of operations, based on radial velocity measurements of more than 10 3 high-resolution stellar spectra. For observation times longer than 250 s, we find that if the chromatic component of the barycentric corrections is ignored, a range of radial velocity errors up to 1 m s −1 can be incurred with cross-correlation, depending on the nightly atmospheric conditions. For this distribution of errors, the standard deviation is 8.4 cm s −1 for G-type stars, 8.5 cm s −1 for K-type stars, and 2.1 cm s −1 for M-type stars. This error is reduced to well-below the instrumental and photon-noise limited floor by frequent flux sampling of the observed star with a low-resolution exposure meter spectrograph.