Demonstration of photon-noise limit in stellar radial velocities

We have measured apparent fluctuations in stellar radial velocities with the ELODIE fiber-fed crossed-dispersion spectrograph and the 193-cm telescope of Observatoire de Haute-Provence. Within one given night, the fluctuations consist of two terms which may be sorted out. The first comes from imperfect scrambling of the stellar beam; the second arises from photon noise and agrees closely with our published calculations. So far, scrambler noise dominates for bright stars, but a perfect scrambler could be built by combining adatative optics and a single-mode fiber. The photon-noise results confirm that extrasolar planetary searching by the radial-velocity technique may be implemented with relatively small telescopes for a large number of stars. Consequences for the detection of astrophysical noise are discussed.