Speaker
Description
An iodine cell placed in the light path of a high-resolution spectrograph can
act as a simultaneous wavelength and point-spread-function fiducial which
enables precise radial velocities to be extracted from un-stabilized or
slit-fed spectrographs. This technique enabled the detection and
characterization of many of the first known exoplanets and played a significant
role in establishing the study of exoplanets as a subfield of astronomy.
However, the pipelines needed to extract precise velocities from the data are
extremely complex and generally treated as a "black boxes" for many end users. I
will explain the methodology of the iodine technique in detail and unveil some
aspects often pushed under the rug. I will show some of the sources of
systematic noise present in the final velocities and describe potential avenues
for the removal of these systematics from the vast library of archival data. I
will discuss some of the limitations inherent to the technique, paths to improve
iodine-based instrumentation, and the role of iodine RV spectroscopy in the
future.
