Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Federica Rescigno is part of the 2025 NASA ExoExplorers cohort, a program that aims to enable the professional development of graduate students and/or postdocs in exoplanet research (“ExoExplorers”).
The ExoExplorers program, sponsored by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office and the ExoPAG Executive Committee, will focus on the professional development of ~10 graduate student and/or postdoc researchers (“ExoExplorers”) at US and international institutions. Each member of the cohort will be featured in a webinar that will be live-streamed to the exoplanet community, helping to increase their visibility within the field and build internal and external research networks. The cohort will also learn from the experiences of established exoplanet researchers and engineers in the field (“ExoGuides”) via a combination of tailored presentations and small group discussions.
Talk title: Hunting for exoearths: Sun-as-a-star RVs to study stellar variability and the BiSON recalibration
Abstract: As the precision and stability of our instruments improve, the intrinsic variability of host stars now represents the greatest barrier for the detection of small exoplanets, especially in the case of Earth-twins. Magnetic activity on the surface of stars generates signals in the radial velocities (RVs) that can mimic or hide the periodic signature of a planet. Solar data have proven to be invaluable in developing targeted mitigation techniques for Extreme Precision Radial Velocity (EPRV) surveys, offering both unparalleled cadence and baselines, and the opportunity to directly link spatially resolved solar phenomena to the variability they imprint in the RVs. In this context, data observed with the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON) are an invaluable asset. However, BiSON's data also presents a further unique challenge in its calibration. I thus present work on the complete re-calibration and re-analysis of the 40 years of BiSON Sun-as-a-star radial-velocity data. The inclusion of simultaneous physically-motivated models describing stellar variability will allow for the investigation of stellar activity phenomena across the solar magnetic activity levels over timescales from minutes to years.
Federica Rescigno is part of the 2025 NASA ExoExplorers cohort, a program that aims to enable the professional development of graduate students and/or postdocs in exoplanet research (“ExoExplorers”).
The ExoExplorers program, sponsored by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office and the ExoPAG Executive Committee, will focus on the professional development of ~10 graduate student and/or postdoc researchers (“ExoExplorers”) at US and international institutions. Each member of the cohort will be featured in a webinar that will be live-streamed to the exoplanet community, helping to increase their visibility within the field and build internal and external research networks. The cohort will also learn from the experiences of established exoplanet researchers and engineers in the field (“ExoGuides”) via a combination of tailored presentations and small group discussions.
Talk title: Hunting for exoearths: Sun-as-a-star RVs to study stellar variability and the BiSON recalibration
Abstract: As the precision and stability of our instruments improve, the intrinsic variability of host stars now represents the greatest barrier for the detection of small exoplanets, especially in the case of Earth-twins. Magnetic activity on the surface of stars generates signals in the radial velocities (RVs) that can mimic or hide the periodic signature of a planet. Solar data have proven to be invaluable in developing targeted mitigation techniques for Extreme Precision Radial Velocity (EPRV) surveys, offering both unparalleled cadence and baselines, and the opportunity to directly link spatially resolved solar phenomena to the variability they imprint in the RVs. In this context, data observed with the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON) are an invaluable asset. However, BiSON's data also presents a further unique challenge in its calibration. I thus present work on the complete re-calibration and re-analysis of the 40 years of BiSON Sun-as-a-star radial-velocity data. The inclusion of simultaneous physically-motivated models describing stellar variability will allow for the investigation of stellar activity phenomena across the solar magnetic activity levels over timescales from minutes to years.
