The Impact of Wavelength Step on Radial Velocity Error

Abstract

Radial velocity (RV) of a star caused by Doppler shift could be easily measured by cross-correlated it’s spectrum with a serial template. Generally, the RV error of a spectrum always is given by the widths of the cross-correlation function of the target spectrum and related template spectrum. RV error comes from many factors, causing from instruments, observation weather, etc.. In this paper, simulation with different types of stellar spectra, which has different temperature, is implemented. The results show that there is an internal error which is not generated by the calculation steps for a given resolution step, for example, 5km/s error exists in the cross-correlation based RV measurement method for resolution about R~2000. The simulation also proves that this error could not be avoided for any type of stars.