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Description
The HIRES spectrograph, mounted on the 10-m Keck-I telescope, belongs to a small group of radial-velocity (RV) instruments that produce stellar RVs with long-term precision down to ~1m/s. In 2017, the HIRES team published 64480 RVs of 1699 stars, collected between 1996 and 2014. In this bank of RVs, we identify a sample of RV-quiet stars, whose RV scatter is <10m/s, and use them to reveal two small but significant nightly zero-point effects: a discontinuous jump, caused by major modifications of the instrument in August 2004, and a long-term drift. The size of the 2004 jump is 1.5+/-0.1m/s, and the slow zero-point variations have a typical magnitude of <1m/s. In addition, we find a small but significant correlation between stellar RVs and the time relative to local midnight, indicative of an average intranight drift of 0.051+/-0.004m/s/h. We correct the 64480 HIRES RVs for the systematic effects we find, and make the corrected RVs publicly available. Our findings demonstrate the importance of observing RV-quiet stars, even in the era of simultaneously-calibrated RV spectrographs. We hope that the corrected HIRES RVs will facilitate the search for new planet candidates around the observed stars.
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