Monday

Since July 2015, the HARPS-N spectrograph has been working day and night with a solar telescope feed into this high-resolution planet-hunter. These HARPS-N observations of the Sun as a star help in understanding the many variations seen in radial velocities that are not due to an exoplanet - stellar activity, data sampling, data reduction et cetera.

Stellar activity and its induced radial velocity variations are currently the main obstacle in detecting and characterising small exoplanets. In this talk I will present the solar data set and the different projects currently undertaken by the HARPS-N solar team in order to understand and model these activity-related variations.