the PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator (PSLS)

We provide the following documents:

• A paper: “The PLATO Solar-like Light-curve Simulator (PSLS): A tool to generate realistic stellar light-curves with instrumental effects representative of the PLATO mission“, Samadi et al, 2019, A&A, 624, A117,  if you use PSLS please cite this paper;
• This presentation

The generation of a given simulation requires the edition of a configuration file in YAML format. The parameters involved in the configuration file are explained here . An example named psms.yaml is also provided in the package.

To execute PSLS, type:

 psls.py -P -V psls.yaml

The option -V makes the program verbose while the option -P generates some plots (the option – -extended-plots  generates additional plots).

As output, the program generates the simulated light-curve in an ASCII file named <ID>.dat, where  ID is the star ID (an arbitrary number defined in the configuration file). By default a single light-curve obtained by averaging over all the cameras is generated. However, with the option -m, the program  averages the  light-curves from the same group of camera and merges (interlace)  them together,  while with the option -f the program returns the individual  light-curves merged (interlaced) together.

—

Here below two other papers in connection with the simulator:

• “Optimized cutting off transit algorithm to study stellar rotation from PLATO mission light curves“, de Almeida et al, 2020, Experimental Astronomy
• “Simu-LC : a Light-Curve simulator for CoRoT”, Baudin et al, 2006, The Corot book, ESA SP 1306
• “Modelling space-based high-precision photometry for asteroseismic applications”, de Ridder et al, 2006, MNRAS