Identification of Young Stellar Variables with KELT for K2 II: The Upper Scorpius Association [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07313


The K2 mission observed the Upper Scorpius association during its Campaign 2 (C2) and will partially re-visit the region during its Campaign 15 (C15) from 23 August to 20 November 2017. The high-precision photometry from K2 enables detailed studies of young star variability. However, K2 campaigns last only 80 days, while young stars can exhibit variability on timescales of months to years; moreover, K2 data are not available until months after the campaigns are completed. Thus putting K2 observations in the context of overall young star variability, as well as pre-identifying interesting variables for simultaneous ground-based observations during K2 campaigns, requires complementary long-baseline photometric surveys. We therefore present light curves of Upper Sco members taken over the last 5.5 years by the ground-based Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT). We show that KELT data can be used to accurately identify the periodic signals found with high-precision K2/C2 photometry, illustrating the power of ground-based surveys in deriving stellar rotation periods of young stars. We also use KELT data to identify sources exhibiting variability that is likely related to circumstellar material and/or stellar activity cycles; these signatures are often unseen in the short-term K2 data, illustrating the importance and complementary nature of long-term monitoring surveys. We provide the KELT light curves as electronic tables as part of an ongoing effort to establish legacy data sets for studying young star variability, complementing the much higher-precision but shorter-term space-based observations from not only K2, but also future mission such as TESS.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Ansdell, R. Oelkers, J. Rodriguez, et. al.
Tue, 25 Jul 17
51/70

Comments: 11 pages, 6 figures; submitted to MNRAS (comments welcome)