Convective motion and Stellar jitter

  • Context: Undergrad 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Jamipat
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Motion Stellar
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
Sign up Log in
1 reply · 3K views
Jamipat
Messages
11
Reaction score
0
Page 26 of http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~rpn/ASTM735/Week7.pdf claims that stellar jitter can be caused by the convective motions in the stellar photosphere.

Can someone explain that to me as I don't understand it?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Astronomy news on Phys.org
Convective motion can cause the photosphere to have currents that move up and down. Since the radial velocity detection methods relies on doppler shift to detect motions in the parent star due to orbiting planets, these currents can introduce noise and uncertainty in the measure of the amount of doppler shift, as the light from that area of the photosphere can be blue or red shifted differently than the rest of the star.