The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. The Catalog of Stellar Proper Motions toward the Magellanic Clouds

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of over 6.2 million stars near the Magellanic Clouds with measured proper motions, parallaxes, and binary candidates, enabling diverse astrophysical studies.

Contribution

The catalog provides high-precision proper motions and parallaxes for a large stellar sample, including white dwarfs and binary systems, based on eight years of observations.

Findings

Over 6.2 million stars cataloged with proper motions.

Identification of around 270 white dwarfs with significant parallaxes.

Discovery of over 500 candidate binary systems.

Abstract

We present a catalog of over 6.2 million stars with measured proper motions. All these stars are observed in the direction of the Magellanic Clouds within the brightness range 12 < I < 19 mag. Based on these proper motions about 440 000 Galactic foreground stars can be selected. Because the proper motions are based on a few hundred epochs collected during eight years, their statistical uncertainties are below 0.5 mas/yr for stars brighter than I = 18.5 mag. The parallaxes are derived with uncertainties down to 1.6 mas. For above 13 000 objects parallaxes are derived with significance above 3\sigma, which allows selecting around 270 white dwarfs (WDs). The search for common proper motion binaries among stars presented was performed resulting in over 500 candidate systems. The most interesting ones are candidate halo main sequence star-WD and WD-WD systems. The application of the catalog to empirically bound the Cepheid instability strip is also discussed.