American Astronomical Society, Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, 8(7), p. 168, 2023
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Abstract We present a data set for investigating the impact of stellar activity on astrometric measurements using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) images of the Sun. The sensitivity of astrometry for detecting exoplanets is limited by stellar activity (e.g., starspots), which causes the measured “center of flux” of the star to deviate from the true, geometric, center, producing false positive detections. We analyze Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager continuum image data obtained from SDO between 2015 July and 2022 December to examine this “astrometric jitter” phenomenon for the Sun. We employ data processing procedures to clean the images and compute the time series of the sunspot-induced shift between the center of flux and the geometric center. The resulting time series show quasiperiodic variations up to 0.05% of the Sun’s radius at its rotation period.