Catalogue of BRITE-Constellation targets I. Fields 1 to 14 (November 2013 - April 2016)

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of photometric data from the BRITE-Constellation mission, analyzing variability in over 300 bright stars across 14 fields observed between 2013 and 2016, highlighting new variable stars and data quality.

Contribution

It provides a detailed description of the BRITE data for 14 fields, including data processing, variability analysis, and identification of new variable stars, encouraging further research using these datasets.

Findings

Detected variability in 64% of the observed stars

Identified 64 stars as new variable star candidates

Data are publicly available for further scientific analysis

Abstract

The BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) mission collects photometric time series in two passbands aiming to investigate stellar structure and evolution. Since their launches in the years 2013 and 2014, the constellation of five BRITE nano-satellites has observed a total of more than 700 individual bright stars in 64 fields. Some targets have been observed multiple times. Thus, the total time base of the data sets acquired for those stars can be as long as nine years. Our aim is to provide a complete description of ready-to-use BRITE data, to show the scientific potential of the BRITE-Constellation data by identifying the most interesting targets, and to demonstrate and encourage how scientists can use these data in their research. We apply a decorrelation process to the automatically reduced BRITE-Constellation data to correct for instrumental effects. We perform a statistical analysis of the light curves obtained for the 300 stars observed in the first 14 fields during the first ~2.5 years of the mission. We also perform cross-identification with the International Variable Star Index. We present the data obtained by the BRITE-Constellation mission in the first 14 fields it observed from November 2013 to April 2016. We also describe the properties of the data for these fields and the 300 stars observed in them. Using these data, we detected variability in 64% of the presented sample of stars. Sixty-four stars or 21.3% of the sample have not yet been identified as variable in the literature and their data have not been analysed in detail. They can therefore provide valuable scientific material for further research. All data are made publicly available through the BRITE Public Data Archive and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre.