Follow-up Imaging of Disk Candidates from the Disk Detective Citizen Science Project: New Discoveries and False-Positives in WISE Circumstellar Disk Surveys
Steven M. Silverberg, Marc J. Kuchner, John P. Wisniewski, Alissa S., Bans, John H. Debes, Scott J. Kenyon, Christoph Baranec, Reed Riddle,, Nicholas Law, Johanna K. Teske, Emily Burns-Kaurin, Milton K.D. Bosch, Tadeas, Cernohous, Katharina Doll, Hugo A. Durantini Luca

TL;DR
This study used follow-up imaging to validate and discover circumstellar disk candidates from the WISE survey, revealing a high false positive rate in previous searches and identifying new promising targets for exoplanet imaging.
Contribution
It provides the first large-scale follow-up imaging analysis of Disk Detective candidates, quantifies false positive rates, and reports 213 new disk systems, including nearby and binary-associated disks.
Findings
7% of initial targets confirmed as disks after follow-up
False positive rates in previous surveys exceed 70%
213 new disk candidates identified, including 27 debris disks
Abstract
The Disk Detective citizen science project aims to find new stars with excess 22-m emission from circumstellar dust in the AllWISE data release from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We evaluated 261 Disk Detective objects of interest with imaging with the Robo-AO adaptive optics instrument on the 1.5m telescope at Palomar Observatory and with RetroCam on the 2.5m du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory to search for background objects at 0.15''-12'' separations from each target. Our analysis of these data lead us to reject 7% of targets. Combining this result with statistics from our online image classification efforts implies that at most of AllWISE-selected infrared excesses are good disk candidates. Applying our false positive rates to other surveys, we find that the infrared excess searches of McDonald et al. (2012), McDonald et al.…
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