Modeling Doppler Shifts in Radial-Velocity Data with Deep Learning toward Earth-mass Exoplanet Detection
Organizations: Department of Astronomy, University of Geneva 51 chemin de Pegasi, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland. · Instituto de Astrofıísica de Andalucía (CSIC), Glorieta de la Astronomía s/n, E-18008 Granada, Spain. · Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC), Carrer de Can Magrans s/n, E-08193 Barcelona, Spain. · Department of Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin, 2515 Speedway, Austin, TX 78712, USA. · Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Universidade do Porto, CAUP, Rua das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto, Portugal. · Department of Physics, University of Oxford, OX13RH Oxford, UK.
Abstract
Detecting the tiny Doppler shifts induced by Earth-mass planets in stellar radial-velocity measurements remains extremely challenging due to stellar activity. Many deep-learning methods performing well on simulated data remain difficult to apply reliably on real stellar spectra. The aim of this work is to develop a deep-learning framework that generalizes to real, unseen spectra and improves the detectability of Earth-mass planets in radial-velocity data. We train artificial neural networks on HARPS-N solar spectra with injected planetary signals, using physics-motivated spectral representations based on flux and line-formation temperature, together with their velocity gradients. Two training strategies are explored: hold-out testing and cross-validation. Model robustness is enhanced through genetic-algorithm-based hyperparameter optimization, and predictive uncertainty is quantified using Monte Carlo dropout. Our most precise neural network model reliably retrieves, under the cross-validation strategy, the amplitudes, phases, and orbital periods of planetary signals with amplitudes greater than or equal to 25 cm/s and periods between 10 and 550 days. In addition, in all cases tested here, the successfully recovered signals correspond to the most significant peaks in the periodograms of the Doppler-shift predictions. Temperature-based spectral-shell representations consistently outperform flux-based shells. We also release doppleriann, a Python package implementing the proposed framework. Our results demonstrate that combining physically motivated spectral representations with deep learning provides a promising pathway toward the detection of Earth-mass planets in radial-velocity data from real observations, supported by a modeling framework that is both physically grounded and statistically rigorous, incorporating uncertainty quantification and optimized training strategies.