Description
The ever increasing level of precision achieved by present and future radial velocity instruments is opening the way to the discovery of very low mass, long period planets (e.g. solar-system analogs). These systems will be detectable as low amplitude signals in radial-velocity (RV). However, an important obstacle to their detection may be the existence of stellar magnetic cycles with similar timescales. Here we present the results of a long term program to measure simultaneously radial-velocities and stellar activity indicators (CaII, H{alpha}, HeI) for a sample of stars with known activity cycles. Our results suggest that all these stellar activity indexes can be used to trace the stellar magnetic cycle in solar-type stars. Further to this, we find clear indications that different parameters of the HARPS cross-correlation function (BIS, FWHM, and Contrast) are also sensitive to activity level variations. Finally, we show that though in a few cases slight correlations or anti-correlations between radial-velocity and the activity level of the star exist, their origin is still not clear. We can however conclude that for our targets (early-K dwarfs) we do not find evidence for radial-velocity variations induced by variations of the stellar magnetic cycle with amplitudes significantly above 1m/s.
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