K2/HARPS measurements for 8 stars

This is of prime importance to mitigate the RV signal induced by stellar activity and therefore unveil the presence of low-mass exoplanets. The K2 Campaign 7 and 8 fields of view were located in the southern hemisphere, and provided a unique opportunity to gather unprecedented simultaneous high-precision photometric observation with K2 and high-precision RV measurements with the HARPS spectrograph to study the relationship between photometric variability and RV jitter.

We observed nine stars with different levels of activity, from quiet to very active. We first probed the presence of any meaningful relation between measured RV jitter and the simultaneous photometric variation, and also other activity indicators (such as BIS, FWHM, logR0'HK, and F8) by evaluating the strength and significance of the monotonic correlation between RVs and each indicator. We found that for the case of very active stars, strong and significant correlations exist between almost all the observables and measured RVs; however, when we move towards lower activity levels the correlations become random, and we could not reach any conclusion regarding the tendency of correlations depending on the stellar activity level.