Modeling Doppler Shifts in Radial-Velocity Data with Deep Learning toward Earth-mass Exoplanet Detection
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.
Sources
- Precise Radial Velocities
- A Decade of Solar High-Fidelity Spectroscopy and Precise Radial Velocities from HARPS-N
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