Avast

A playground for exploring time-domain variations in stellar spectra.

Authors

• Megan Bedell (Chicago)
• David W. Hogg (NYU) (MPIA) (Flatiron)

License

All content is Copyright 2016 the authors. The software components of Avast are licensed under the MIT License. See the file LICENSE for more details.

Description

Stellar spectra are not constant in time. There are effects of surface convection, flares, sunspots, rotation, and stellar oscillations. (In some stars, there can also be variable cloud cover, external eclipsing bodies, variable interstellar material, or microlensing.) Most or all of these sources of variability will lead to spectral changes, and also brightness or (effective) radial-velocity changes. They are important, therefore, for testing models of stars, and also for making extremely precise measurements of stellar parameters or radial velocities.

Projects

• Searches for time variability in stellar spectra.
• Regression of stellar spectra against measured radial velocity.
• Searches for variance across stellar identical twins.