On the use of field RR Lyrae as Galactic probes VII. light curve templates in the LSST photometric system

TL;DR

This paper develops light curve templates for RR Lyrae stars in the LSST photometric system to improve early distance measurements, leveraging existing survey data and models, thus enabling more precise galactic mapping before LSST's full operation.

Contribution

It presents the first construction of RR Lyrae light curve templates in the LSST bands, using multi-survey data and models, to enhance early distance estimates with LSST.

Findings

LCTs can reduce distance uncertainty by at least a factor of two.

LCTs built with ZTF and DECam data are applicable to LSST photometry.

Discovered new amplitude ratio behavior in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Abstract

The \textit{Vera C. Rubin} Observatory will start operations in 2025. During the first two years, too few visits per target per band will be available, meaning that mean magnitude measurements of variable stars will not be precise and thus, standard candles like RR Lyrae (RRL) will not be usable. Light curve templates (LCTs) can be adopted to estimate the mean magnitude of a variable star with few magnitude measurements, provided that their period (plus amplitude and reference epoch, depending on how the LCT is applied) is known. LSST will provide precise RRL periods within the first six months, allowing to exploit RRLs if LCTs were available. We aim to build LCTs in the LSST bands to enhance the early science with LSST. Using them will provide a 1-2 years advantage with respect to a classical approach, concerning distance measurements. We collected $gri$-band data from the ZTF survey and $z$-band data from DECam to build the LCTs of RRLs. We also adopted synthetic $griz$-band data in the LSST system from pulsation models, plus SDSS, \gaia and OGLE photometry, inspecting the light amplitude ratios in different photometric systems to provide useful conversions to apply the LCTs. We have built LCTs of RRLs in the $griz$ bands of the LSST photometric system; for the $z$ band, we could build only fundamental-mode RRL LCTs. We quantitatively demonstrated that LCTs built with ZTF and DECam data can be adopted on the LSST photometric system. LCTs will decrease by a factor of at least two the uncertainty on distance estimates of RRLs, with respect to a simple average of the available measurements. Finally, within our tests, we have found a brand new behavior of amplitude ratios in the Large Magellanic Cloud.