Variability Catalog of Stars Observed During the TESS Prime Mission

TL;DR

This paper catalogs stellar variability observed by TESS during its Prime Mission, identifying over 84,000 variable stars and analyzing their properties across different stellar types and periods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive catalog of stellar variability from TESS data, including newly identified variables and detailed analysis of variability patterns across the HR diagram.

Findings

Over 46,000 high-confidence periodic variables identified

Clear correlations between period and luminosity for certain star types

Approximately 65,000 newly discovered variable stars

Abstract

During its 2-year Prime Mission, TESS observed over 232,000 stars at a 2-min cadence across ~70% of the sky. These data provide a record of photometric variability across a range of astrophysically interesting time scales, probing stellar rotation, stellar binarity, and pulsations. We have analyzed the TESS 2-min light curves to identify periodic variability on timescales 0.01-13 days, and explored the results across various stellar properties. We have identified over 46,000 periodic variables with high confidence, and another 38,000 with moderate confidence. These light curves show differences in variability type across the HR diagram, with distinct groupings of rotational, eclipsing, and pulsational variables. We also see interesting patterns across period-luminosity space, with clear correlations between period and luminosity for high-mass pulsators, evolved stars, and contact binary systems, a discontinuity corresponding to the Kraft break, and a lower occurrence of periodic variability in main-sequence stars on timescales of 1.5 to 2 days. The variable stars identified in this work are cross-identified with several other variability catalogs, from which we find good agreement between the measured periods of variability. There are ~65,000 variable stars that are newly identified in this work, which includes rotation rates of low-mass stars, high-frequency pulsation periods for high-mass stars, and a variety of giant star variability.