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arXiv · 2402.14954

Methods for the detection of stellar rotation periods in individual TESS sectors and results from the Prime mission

Isabel L. Colman·Ruth Angus·Trevor David·Jason Curtis·Soichiro Hattori·Yuxi Lucy Lu
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Abstract

For ongoing studies of the role of rotation in stellar evolution, we require large catalogs of rotation periods for testing and refining gyrochronology. While there is a wealth of data from the Kepler and K2 missions, TESS presents both an opportunity and a challenge: despite its all-sky coverage, rotation periods remain hard to detect. We analyzed individual TESS sectors to detect short-period stellar rotation, using only parameters measured from light curves for a robust and unbiased method of evaluating detections. We used random forest classifiers for vetting, trained on a large corpus of period measurements in KELT data from the Oelkers et al. (2018) catalog and using TESS full-frame image light curves generated by eleanor (Feinstein et al. 2019). Finally, using data from the first 26 sectors of TESS, we analyzed 432,704 2-minute cadence single-sector light curves for FGKM dwarfs. We detected 16,800 periods in individual sector light curves, covering 10,909 distinct targets, and we present a catalog of the median period for each target as measured by a Lomb-Scargle periodogram.

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Isabel L. Colman, Ruth Angus, Trevor David, Jason Curtis, Soichiro Hattori, Yuxi Lucy Lu. 2024-02-22. Methods for the detection of stellar rotation periods in individual TESS sectors and results from the Prime mission. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14954

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