Measuring Long Stellar Rotation Periods (>10 days) from TESS FFI Light Curves is Possible: An Investigation Using TESS and ZTF

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that long stellar rotation periods over 10 days can be reliably measured from TESS FFI light curves, expanding the potential for studying slow rotators using TESS data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a modified Lomb-Scargle periodogram and validates its effectiveness for detecting long rotation periods from TESS data, using ZTF as a reference.

Findings

66% of TESS periods match ZTF periods within 10%

Match rate increases to 81% with higher LS power threshold

Confirms TESS's capability to measure periods >10 days

Abstract

The rotation period of a star is an important quantity that provides insight into its structure and state. For stars with surface features like starspots, their periods can be inferred from brightness variations as these features move across the stellar surface. TESS, with its all-sky coverage, is providing the largest sample of stars for obtaining rotation periods. However, most of the periods have been limited to shorter than the 13.7-day TESS orbital period due to strong background signals (e.g., scattered light) on those timescales. In this study, we investigated the viability of measuring longer periods (> 10 days) from TESS light curves for stars in the Northern Continuous Viewing Zone (NCVZ). We first created a reference set of 272 period measurements longer than 10 days for K & M dwarfs in the NCVZ using data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) that we consider as the "ground truth" given ZTF's long temporal baseline of 6+ years. We then used the unpopular pipeline to de-trend TESS light curves and implemented a modified Lomb-Scargle (LS) periodogram that accounts for flux offsets between observing sectors. For 179 out of the 272 sources (66%), the TESS-derived periods match the ZTF-derived periods to within 10%. The match rate increases to 81% (137 out of 170) when restricting to sources with a TESS LS power that exceeds a threshold. Our results confirm the capability of measuring periods longer than 10 days from TESS data, highlighting the dataset's potential for studying slow rotators.