Abstract

Telluric absorption lines impact the measuring of precise radial velocities (RVs) from high-resolution ground-based spectrographs. In this paper, we simulate the dependence of this impact on stellar spectral type and extend the work of the first paper in this series, which studied a G-type star, to a synthetic M-dwarf star. We quantify the bias in precise RV measurements in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) from the presence of tellurics in a simulated set of observations. We find that M-dwarf RVs are more impacted by tellurics compared to G-type stars. Specifically, for an M-dwarf star, tellurics can induce RV errors of up to 16 cm s−1 in the red optical and in excess of 220 cm s−1 in the NIR. For a G dwarf, the comparable RV systematics are 3 cm s−1 in the red optical and 240 cm s−1 in the NIR. We attribute this relative increase for M-dwarf stars to the increased concordance in wavelength between telluric lines and stellar Doppler information content. We compare the results of our simulation to data collected for Barnard’s star from the iSHELL spectrograph at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. This study was conducted as a follow-up to the NASA probe mission concept study EarthFinder.

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