Comparing Period Recovery Methods: Lomb-Scargle and Analysis of Variance

Abstract

In our galaxy, many stellar systems have orbiting low-mass companions. In order to model the radial velocity orbital curves of the low-mass companions, we must correctly identify the orbital period. We have tested two period finding algorithms: Lomb-Scargle (LS) and Analysis of Variance (AoV). Using these algorithms, we recovered periods from our synthetic data and compared them to the true values. We find that LS has a 69.9% chance of recovering the correct period, while AoV has a 57.5% recovery rate. We will discuss effects on orbital period recovery rate due to parameters like period, eccentricity, and semi-amplitude.