Inferring Stellar Parameters from Iodine-Imprinted Keck/HIRES Spectra with Machine Learning
This work addresses a bottleneck in exoplanet surveys using iodine-cell-calibrated spectrographs, providing a practical solution for astronomers to estimate stellar parameters without needing additional observing time for template spectra.
The paper tackles the problem of characterizing exoplanet host stars from iodine-imprinted spectra, which traditionally require separate iodine-free templates, by demonstrating that machine learning methods can infer stellar parameters and chemical abundances with high accuracy and precision, offering an efficient new avenue for rapid estimation.
The properties of exoplanet host stars are traditionally characterized through a detailed forward-modeling analysis of high-resolution spectra. However, many exoplanet radial velocity surveys employ iodine-cell-calibrated spectrographs, such that the vast majority of spectra obtained include an imprinted forest of iodine absorption lines. For surveys that use iodine cells, iodine-free "template" spectra must be separately obtained for precise stellar characterization. These template spectra often require extensive additional observing time to obtain, and they are not always feasible to obtain for faint stars. In this paper, we demonstrate that machine learning methods can be applied to infer stellar parameters and chemical abundances from iodine-imprinted spectra with high accuracy and precision. The methods presented in this work are broadly applicable to any iodine-cell-calibrated spectrograph. We make publicly available our spectroscopic pipeline, the Cannon HIRES Iodine Pipeline (CHIP), which derives stellar parameters and 15 chemical abundances from iodine-imprinted spectra of FGK stars and which has been set up for ease of use with Keck/HIRES spectra. Our proof-of-concept offers an efficient new avenue to rapidly estimate a large number of stellar parameters even in the absence of an iodine-free template spectrum.