You will note a new 'Ask AI' button at the bottom of the documentation pages. This is a very experimental feature, powered by GuruBase. Under the hood there is the "kima guru" 🧙♂️, an AI model with a RAG engine that uses the context provided by the documentation to provide more accurate answers.
It goes without saying, but please apply common sense when interacting with this AI model. It can, and most likely will, make mistakes.
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In version 6.2.1, my name correctly includes the tilde (~) that had been missing for a few months. The importance of this update cannot be overstated.
Dalal et al. (2024) report on the discovery of three candidate super-Earths 🌍 orbiting HD48948 using high-precision RVs obtained with the HARPS-N spectrograph. They explored several methods to extract the RVs and to mitigate stellar variability. kima is used as part of the TWEAKS pipeline described by Anna John et al. (2023).
A new version of kima has been released on PyPI today. Yes, you read that right: kima is now on PyPI and can be installed with a simple
pip install kima
This is a major milestone!
Coupled with the PyPI release, there are several other changes in the package. Most notably, kima is now a Python-centered package, using high-performance bindings of the C++ code provided by nanobind. This simplifies the use of the code by a factor of several hundreds!! (personal estimate)
In a very interesting new paper, Sairam et al. (2023) develop two new methods to extract precise radial velocities of double-lined binary stars, and present the detection of a circumbinary planet orbiting TIC 172900988. They used kima for most of the RV analyses, including new developments which allow for the simultaneous fitting of both components of double-lined binaries, correction for General Relativity effects, and that can fit for apsidal precession of the binary.
The radial-velocity follow-up of transiting planets requires large amounts of telescope time. In Cabona et al. (2021), we compared different scheduling strategies with respect to the bias, accuracy and precision achieved in recovering the mass and orbital parameters of transiting and non-transiting planets.