Cluster Difference Imaging Photometric Survey. I. Light Curves of Stars in Open Clusters from TESS Sectors 6 & 7

TL;DR

This paper presents a large-scale survey of star light curves from TESS data focusing on young stars in open clusters, aiming to facilitate exoplanet detection and stellar astrophysics research.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset of over 159,000 light curves from TESS, along with the image processing and analysis techniques used to generate them, targeting young star populations.

Findings

Light curves match theoretical noise expectations.

Sample useful for stellar rotation and binary studies.

Data is publicly available for community use.

Abstract

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is providing precise time-series photometry for most star clusters in the solar neighborhood. Using the TESS images, we have begun a Cluster Difference Imaging Photometric Survey (CDIPS), in which we are focusing both on stars that are candidate cluster members, and on stars that show indications of youth. Our aims are to discover giant transiting planets with known ages, and to provide light curves suitable for studies in stellar astrophysics. For this work, we made 159,343 light curves of candidate young stars, across 596 distinct clusters. Each light curve represents between 20 and 25 days of observations of a star brighter than $G_{\rm Rp}=16$, with 30-minute sampling. We describe the image subtraction and time-series analysis techniques we used to create the light curves, which have noise properties that agree with theoretical expectations. We also comment on the possible utility of the light curve sample for studies of stellar rotation evolution, and binary eccentricity damping. The light curves, which cover about one sixth of the galactic plane, are available as a MAST High Level Science Product at https://doi.org/10.17909/t9-ayd0-k727 .