Impulsive short term variations occur in all kinds of solar-type stars. They are the results of complex phenomena such as the stellar magnetic field reconnection, low-level variability or in some cases even star-planet interactions. The radiation arising from these events is often highly energetic and, in stars hosting planets, may interact with the planetary atmospheres. Studying the rate of these energetic phenomena is fundamental to understand their role in modifying the chemical composition or, in some extreme cases, to the disruption of the planetary atmospheres. Here, we present a new procedure developed to identify the impulsive events in TESS light curves. Our goal is to have a simple and effective tool to study the short-term activity of a star using only its light curve, in order to derive its distribution and energetic. As our first case, we studied the system DS Tuc. Our technique consists of fitting the TESS light curves using iteratively Gaussian processes in order to remove all the long-term stellar activity contributions. Then, we identify the impulsive events and, derive amplitudes, time scales and the amount of energy emitted. We validate our procedure using the AU Mic TESS light curves obtaining results consistent with those presented in the literature. We estimate the frequency distribution of energetic events for DS Tuc. In particular, we find that there are approx 2 events per day with energy greater than 2x10^32 erg. We find evidence for a favoured stellar phase for short term activity on AU Mic, and also indications of short term activity in phase with the planetary orbit. For DS Tuc we find that the events distribution is not equally spaced in time but often grouped. The resulting distribution may be used to estimate the impact of short term variability on planetary atmosphere chemical compositions.
The Tucana-Horologium Association (Tuc-Hor) is a 40 Myr old moving group in the southern sky. In this work, we measure the rotation periods of 313 Tuc-Hor objects with TESS light curves derived from TESS full frame images and membership lists driven by Gaia EDR3 kinematics and known youth indicators. We recover a period for 81.4% of the sample and report 255 rotaion periods for Tuc-Hor objects. From these objects we identify 11 candidate binaries based on multiple periodic signals or outlier Gaia DR2 and EDR3 re-normalised unit weight error (RUWE) values. We also identify three new complex rot…
The TESS mission will survey ~85 % of the sky, giving us the opportunity of extracting high-precision light curves of millions of stars, including stellar cluster members. In this work, we present our project "A PSF-based Approach to TESS High quality data Of Stellar clusters" (PATHOS), aimed at searching and characterise candidate exoplanets and variable stars in stellar clusters using our innovative method for the extraction of high-precision light curves of stars located in crowded environments. Our technique of light-curve extraction involves the use of empirical Point Spread Functions (PS…
Young exoplanets are snapshots of the planetary evolution process. Planets that orbit stars in young associations are particularly important because the age of the planetary system is well constrained. We present the discovery of a transiting planet larger than Neptune but smaller than Saturn in the 45 Myr Tucana-Horologium young moving group. The host star is a visual binary, and our follow-up observations demonstrate that the planet orbits the G6V primary component, DS Tuc A (HD 222259A, TIC 410214986). We first identified transits using photometry from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satell…
We use data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to search for, and set limits on, optical to near-infrared photometric variability of the well-vetted, candidate James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spectrophotometric standards. Our search of 37 of these candidate standards has revealed measurable periodic variability in 15 stars. The majority of those show variability that is less than half a percent; however, four stars are observed to vary photometrically, from minimum to maximum flux, by more than 1% (the G dwarf HD 38949 and three fainter A dwarfs). Variability of this size …
The origin of the observed diversity of planetary system architectures is one of the main topic of the exoplanetary research. The detection of a statistically significant sample of planets around young stars allows us to study the early stages of planet formation and evolution, but only a handful of them is known so far. In this regard, a considerable contribution is expected from the NASA TESS satellite, which is now performing a survey of $\sim 85 \%$ of the sky to search for short-period transiting planets In its first month of operations, TESS found a planet candidate with an orbital perio…
Data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has produced of order one million light curves at cadences of 120 s and especially 1800 s for every ~27-day observing sector during its two-year nominal mission. These data constitute a treasure trove for the study of stellar variability and exoplanets. However, to fully utilize the data in such studies a proper removal of systematic noise sources must be performed before any analysis. The TESS Data for Asteroseismology (T'DA) group is tasked with providing analysis-ready data for the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium, which covers…
The current and upcoming high precision photometric surveys such as TESS, CHEOPS, and PLATO will provide the community with thousands of new exoplanet candidates. As a consequence, the presence of such a correlation is crucial in selecting the targets with the lowest RV jitter for efficient RV follow-up of exoplanetary candidates. Studies of this type are also crucial to design optimized observational strategies to mitigate RV jitter when searching for Earth-mass exoplanets. Our goal is to assess the correlation between high-precision photometric variability measurements and high-precision RV …
Dept. of Physics, University of Warwick（华威大学物理系）；Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability, University of Warwick（华威大学系外行星与宜居性中心）
Young exoplanets and their corresponding host stars are fascinating laboratories for constraining the timescale of planetary evolution and planet-star interactions. However, because young stars are typically much more active than the older population, in order to discover more young exoplanets, greater knowledge of the wide array of young star variability is needed. Here Kohonen Self Organising Maps (SOMs) are used to explore young star variability present in the first year of observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), with such knowledge valuable to perform targeted d…
The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is observing tens of millions of stars with time spans ranging from $\sim$ 27 days to about 1 year of continuous observations. This vast amount of data contains a wealth of information for variability, exoplanet, and stellar astrophysics studies but requires a number of processing steps before it can be fully utilized. In order to efficiently process all the TESS data and make it available to the wider scientific community, the TESS Data for Asteroseismology working group, as part of the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium, has created an…
The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) has been surveying more than $70\%$ of the celestial sphere for nearly a decade. While the primary science goal of the survey is the discovery of transiting, large-radii planets around bright host stars, the survey has collected more than $10^6$ images, with a typical cadence between $10-30$ minutes, for more than $4$ million sources with apparent visual magnitudes in the approximate range $7<V<13$. Here we provide a catalog of 52,741 objects showing significant large-amplitude fluctuations likely caused by stellar variability and 62,229 objects…
Variability classification of TESS targets in LOPS2, the first long-term pointing field of PLATO. Version 1 of the public variability catalogue
KU Leuven（荷语鲁汶大学）；MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics & Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院卡弗里天体物理与空间研究所）；Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences（捷克科学院天文研究所）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）
The dayside brightness spectrum of a highly irradiated transiting brown dwarf KELT-1b has been shown to be challenging to explain with the current brown dwarf atmosphere models. The spectrum has been measured from observations spanning ten years and covering high-precision secondary eclipses and phase curves from space in blue-visible (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite, CHEOPS), red-visible (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS), and near-infrared (Spitzer), as well as secondary eclipse observations in near-infrared from the ground. First, the dayside of KELT-1b was observed to be brig…
Interpreting the short-timescale variability of the accreting, young, low-mass stars known as Classical T Tauri stars remains an open task. Month-long, continuous light curves from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (\textit{TESS}) have become available for hundreds of T Tauri stars. With this vast data set, identifying connections between the variability observed by \TESS and short-timescale accretion variability is valuable for characterizing the accretion process. To this end, we obtained short-cadence \TESS observations of 14 T Tauri stars in the Taurus star-formation region along w…
Recent discoveries have demonstrated that planetary systems routinely survive the post-main sequence evolution of their host stars, leaving the resulting white dwarf with a rich circumsteller environment. Among the most intriguing of such hosts is the hot white dwarf GD 394, exhibiting a unique $1.150\pm0.003$ d flux variation detected in Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) observations in the mid 1990s. The variation has eluded a satisfactory explanation, but hypotheses include channeled accretion producing a dark spot of metals, occultation by a gas cloud from an evaporating planet, or heati…
The inhomogeneous surface distribution of heavy elements is known to cause periodic light variability of magnetic chemically peculiar stars. It is unclear to what extent the same paradigm applies to mercury-manganese (HgMn) stars. We aim to model the photometric variability of the HgMn star ϕPhe using abundance maps obtained from high-resolution spectroscopy and to study how this variability evolves with time. We compute a grid of ATLAS12 model atmospheres and the corresponding SYNSPEC synthetic spectra. Interpolating within this grid and integrating the specific intensity over the visible ste…
ASTRAFier: A Novel and Scalable Transformer-based Stellar Variability Classifier
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics & Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院卡弗里天体物理与空间研究所）；Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven（荷语鲁汶大学天文研究所）；Astronomical Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences（捷克科学院天文研究所）；Department of Physics, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学物理系）
Multiwavelength Campaign Observations of a Young Solar-type Star, EK Draconis. III. Comparison between Starspot Mapping, Zeeman Doppler Imaging, and Multiwavelength Variability
Hitotsubashi University（一桥大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University（京都大学博雅研究高级中心）；Department of Physics, Kyoto University（京都大学物理学系）；NASA Goddard Space Flight Center（美国宇航局戈达德太空飞行中心）；Department of Physics, The Catholic University of America（美利坚天主教大学物理学系）；Division of Science, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, NINS（日本国立天文台科学部）；Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, CNES（图卢兹大学、法国国家科学研究中心、法国国家空间研究中心天体物理与行星学研究所在）；Department of Physics, American University（美国大学物理学系）
Although more than 5000 TESS Objects of Interest have been cataloged, no comprehensive survey of the flare rates of their host stars exists. We perform the first flare survey of all 2250 non-retired TOIs with 2 min cadence light curves to measure or place upper limits on their flare rates. We find 93 candidates orbit flare stars and measure their flare frequency distributions. Across the sample, TOIs of <1.5R_Earth orbit flare stars more frequently than do TOIs of 1.5<R<2.75R_Earth, 2.75<R<4R_Earth, or R<4R_Earth. We sort all TOI host stars by their flare rate/upper limit, stellar mass, and di…
Lack of high-precision long-term continuous photometric data for large samples of stars has prevented the large-scale exploration of pulsational variability in the OB star regime. As a result, the candidates for in-depth asteroseismic modelling remained limited to a few tens of dwarfs. The TESS nominal space mission has surveyed the southern sky, yielding continuous data of at least 27 d for hundreds of OB stars. We aim to couple TESS data in the southern sky with spectroscopy to study the variability over mass and evolution. We focus mainly on the presence of coherent pulsation modes that may…
TESS photometry is analyzed for 432 classical Be stars observed in the first year of the mission. The often complex and diverse variability of each object in this sample is classified to obtain an understanding of the behavior of this class as a population. 98\% of the systems are variable above the noise level, with timescales spanning nearly the entire range of what is accessible with TESS, from tens of minutes to tens of days. The variability seen with TESS is summarized as follows. Nearly every system contains multiple periodic signals in the frequency regime between about 0.5 -- 4 d$^{-1}…
Aims: We investigate the photometric properties of the M7.5 equal-mass binary VHS J1256-1257AB, which, combined with the late-L dwarf VHS J1256-1257 b, forms one of the few young triple systems of ultra-cool dwarfs currently known. Methods: We analyzed two-minute TESS and two-second Spitzer archival data with total durations of about 25 days and 36 hours, respectively. Typical precision in the data is $\pm$1.5 % for TESS and $\pm$0.1 % (in 1 minute) for Spitzer. Results: The optical and infrared light curves periodically exhibit epochs of quasi-sinusoidal modulation followed by epochs of stoch…
A sample of 4 thousands Gaia sources with apparent $G$-band magnitudes of $<17$ and trigonometric parallaxes of $>3.33$ milli-arcseconds were cross-matched to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey high level science products and the Full-Frame Images in order to extract the light curves of possible white dwarf variables. Most of the targets in the sample were observed in at least 27-day observing cycle with 30-minutes cadence. Based on Lomb-Scargle periodogram constructed from de-trended light curves, more than 600 sources have indication of periodic variability. This paper presents the early result…
We present the first results from a study of TESS Sector 1 and 2 light curves for eight evolved massive stars in the LMC: six yellow supergiants (YSGs) and two luminous blue variables (LBVs), including S Doradus. We use an iterative prewhitening procedure to characterize the short-timescale variability in all eight stars. The periodogram of one of the YSGs, HD 269953, displays multiple strong peaks at higher frequencies than its fellows. While the field surrounding HD 269953 is quite crowded, it is the brightest star in the region, and has infrared colors indicating it is dusty. We suggest HD …
Uncertainties in stellar structure and evolution theory are largest for stars undergoing core convection on the main sequence. A powerful way to calibrate the free parameters used in the theory of stellar interiors is asteroseismology, which provides direct measurements of angular momentum and element transport. We report the detection and classification of new variable O and B stars using high-precision short-cadence (2-min) photometric observations assembled by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). In our sample of 154 O and B stars, we detect a high percentage (90%) of variabili…
The new photometric data on pulsating Ap star HD~27463 obtained recently with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (\textit{TESS}) are analysed to search for variability. Our analysis shows that HD~27463 exhibits two types of photometric variability. The low frequency variability with the period $P$ =~2.834274 $\pm$ 0.000008 d can be explained in terms of axial stellar rotation assuming the oblique magnetic rotator model and presence of surface abundance/brightness spots, while the detected high-frequency variations are characteristics of $δ$~Scuti pulsations. From the analysis of Balmer …
Mercury-manganese (HgMn) stars are late-B upper main sequence chemically peculiar stars distinguished by large overabundances of heavy elements, slow rotation, and frequent membership in close binary systems. These stars lack strong magnetic fields typical of magnetic Bp stars but occasionally exhibit non-uniform surface distributions of chemical elements. The physical origin and the extent of this spot formation phenomenon remains unknown. Here we use 2-min cadence light curves of 64 HgMn stars observed by the TESS satellite during the first two years of its operation to investigate the incid…
In photometry of $γ$ Cas (B0.5 IVe) from the SMEI and BRITE-Constellation satellites, indications of low-order non-radial pulsation have recently been found, which would establish an important commonality with the class of classical Be stars at large. New photometry with the TESS satellite has detected three frequency groups near 1.0 ($g1$), 2.4 ($g2$), and 5.1 ($g3$) d$^{-1}$, respectively. Some individual frequencies are nearly harmonics or combination frequencies but not exactly so. Frequency groups are known from roughly three quarters of all classical Be stars and also from pulsations of …
TESS Observations of Stochastic Low-frequency Variability in Extreme Helium Stars
Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA), School of Physics, University of Sydney（悉尼大学物理学院天体物理研究所）；Armagh Observatory and Planetarium（阿马赫天文台和行星馆）；School of Physics, University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学物理学院）；Space Science Institute (SSI)（太空科学研究所）；Department of Physics & Astronomy, Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学物理与天文学系）；Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7095, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris（索邦大学，法国国家科学研究中心，UMR 7095，巴黎天体物理研究所）
Metallic-line A (Am) stars are main-sequence stars of around twice the mass of the Sun that show element abundance peculiarities in their spectra. The radiative levitation and diffusive settling processes responsible for these abundance anomalies should also deplete helium from the region of the envelope that drives delta Scuti pulsations. Therefore, these stars are not expected to be delta Scuti stars, which pulsate in multiple radial and nonradial modes with periods of around 2 hours. As part of the NASA TESS Guest Investigator Program, we proposed photometric observations in 2-minute cadenc…
Signs of magnetic star-planet interactions in HD 118203. TESS detects stellar variability that matches the orbital period of a close-in eccentric Jupiter-sized companion
The TESS space mission is producing superb data for asteroseismology, eclipsing binary stars, gyrochronology, and other fields of stellar astronomy where the data are variable light curves. We show that TESS data are excellent for astrophysical inference from peculiar stars that show variability. The Ap stars have the strongest magnetic fields of any main-sequence stars. Some have been shown to have rotation periods of months to centuries. The astrophysical cause of their slow rotation -- the braking mechanism -- is not known with certainty. These stars are rare: there are currently about 3 do…
During the last two years we have received long time-series photometric observations of bright (V mag < 8) main-sequence A- and B-type stars observed by the NASA TESS spacecraft and the Austria-Poland-Canada BRITE satellites. Using TESS observations of metallic-line A (Am) stars having peculiar element abundances, our goal is to determine whether and why these stars pulsate in multiple radial and non-radial modes, as do the delta Scuti stars in the same region of the H-R diagram. The BRITE data were requested to investigate pulsations in bright (V around 6 mag) A- and B-type stars in the Cygnu…
Superflares on solar-type stars has been a rapidly developing field ever since the launch of $\it Kepler$. Over the years, there have been several studies investigating the statistics of these explosive events. In this study, we present a statistical analysis of stellar flares on solar-type stars made using photometric data in 2-min cadence from $\it TESS$ of the whole southern hemisphere (sectors 1 - 13). We derive rotational periods for all stars in our sample from rotational modulations present in the lightcurve as a result of large starspot(s) on the surface. We identify 1980 stellar flare…
Chromospheric activity cycles are common in late-type stars; however, only a handful of coronal activity cycles have been discovered. \ihor\ is the most active and youngest star with known coronal cycles. It is also a young solar analog, and we are likely facing the earliest cycles in the evolution of solar-like stars, at an age (~600 Myr) when life appeared on Earth. Our aim is to confirm the ~1.6 yr coronal cycle and characterize its stability over time. We use X-ray observations of iota Hor to study the corona of a star representing the solar past through variability, thermal structure, and…
We investigate small-scale light variations in V646 Pup occurring on different timescales with the aim to investigate whether this variability is similar to that observed in FU Ori. We observed V646 Pup at the SAAO and CTIO between 2013 and 2018 with Johnson and Sloan filters, typically using a one-day cadence maintained for 1-4 weeks. We also utilised the public-domain 1512-day-long ASAS-SN light curve and TESS photometry obtained in 2019 over 24.1 days with a 30 min cadence. New SAAO low-resolution spectra assist in updating major disc parameters, while the archival high-resolution Keck spec…
We present an update on the variable star survey performed on the TESS 30 min Full Frame Image (FFI) data reported by our first two papers in this series. This update includes a contamination analysis in order to identify false positives and analysis of the TESS 10 min FFI data collected during Years 3 and 4 of the mission. We clarify the variability status of 2 995 targets identifying 1 403 variable stars. In addition, we spectroscopically classify 24 pre-filtered targets sampled with the 10 min FFI data and discover 11 new sdB pulsators. Future follow-up space- and/or ground-based data of va…
EncoTESS: Age-Sensitive Encodings from Raw TESS Light Curves
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto（多伦多大学邓拉普天文与天体物理研究所）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；Data Sciences Institute, University of Toronto（多伦多大学数据科学研究所）
Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM): massive star variability revealed using a novel software tool for point-spread function fitting of TESS images
Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；KU Leuven（荷语鲁汶大学）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学安东·潘内科克天文学研究所）；Universität Bonn（波恩大学）
