ANALYSIS OF RADIAL VELOCITY DATA BY A NOVEL ADAPTIVE APPROACH

In this paper, we introduce an estimation technique for analyzing radial velocity data commonly encountered in extrasolar planet detection. We discuss the Keplerian model for radial velocity data measurements and introduce a technique named the iterative adaptive approach (IAA) to estimate the three-dimensional spectrum (power versus eccentricity, orbital period and periastron passage time) of the radial velocity data. We then discuss different ways to regularize the IAA algorithm in the presence of noise and measurement errors. We also discuss briefly the computational aspects of the method and introduce a computationally efficient version of IAA. Finally, we establish the significance of the spectral peaks by using a relaxation maximum likelihood algorithm and a generalized likelihood ratio test. Numerical experiments are carried out on both simulated and real life data sets to evaluate the performance of our method. The real life data sets discussed are radial velocity measurements of the stars HD 63454, HD 208487, and GJ 876.