The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has an exceptionally large plate scale of 21″ px−1, causing most TESS light curves to record the blended light of multiple stars. This creates a danger of misattributing variability observed by TESS to the wrong source, which would invalidate any analysis. We developed a method that can localize the origin of variability on the sky to better than one fifth of a pixel. Given measured frequencies of variability (e.g., from periodogram analysis), we show that the best-fit sinusoid amplitudes to raw light curves extracted from each pixel are distributed in the same way as light from the variable source. The primary assumption of this method is that other nearby stars are not variable at the same frequencies. Essentially, we are using the high frequency resolution of TESS to overcome limitations from its low spatial resolution. We have implemented our method in an open-source Python package,
Given its large plate scale of 21″ pixel−1, analyses of data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope must be wary of source confusion from blended light curves, which creates the potential to attribute observed photometric variability to the wrong astrophysical source. We explore the impact of light curve contamination on the detection of fast yellow pulsating supergiant (FYPS) stars as a case study to demonstrate the importance of confirming the source of detected signals in the TESS pixel data. While some of the FYPS signals have already been attributed to contamination from nearby eclipsing binaries, others are suggested to be intrinsic to the supergiant stars. In this work, we carry out a detailed analysis of the TESS pixel data to fit the source locations of the dominant signals reported for 17 FYPS stars with the Python package
- PAR ID:
- 10413652
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.3847
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astronomical Journal
- Volume:
- 165
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0004-6256
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. 239
- Size(s):
- Article No. 239
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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