Radial Velocity Periodogram: Recovering an Exoplanet's Period from Noisy Data

Detecting an exoplanet by radial velocity doesn't stop at the smooth Doppler curve textbooks draw — real spectrographs deliver a handful of noisy, irregularly-timed measurements, and astronomers must dig the orbital period back out of that scatter statistically. This simulator generates a synthetic observing campaign of a star wobbling under an unseen planet's pull — complete with instrument jitter and, optionally, the seasonal visibility gaps every ground-based telescope faces — and then runs a genuine Lomb-Scargle periodogram over the data with no knowledge of the true period. Watch the recovered period converge on the true one as you add more observations or cut the noise, and watch aliasing artifacts appear the moment seasonal gaps are switched on — the exact signal-processing challenge behind every real RV exoplanet discovery.