Modeling Doppler Shifts in Radial-Velocity Data with Deep Learning toward Earth-mass Exoplanet Detection

arXiv:2606.18464 · astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.EP, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-06-16 · Read on arXiv

Isidro Gómez-Vargas, Xavier Dumusque, Yinan Zhao, Khaled Al Moulla, Michael Cretignier

astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.EP, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-06-16

Comments: 20 pages, 14 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202659375

Code: https://github.com/igomezv/doppleriann

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Detecting the tiny Doppler shifts induced by Earth-mass planets in stellar radial-velocity measurements remains extremely challenging due to stellar activity.

Terminology

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.

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