COSMIC-L: A Photometric Catalog of Observed Stars in the Large MagellanIc Cloud

TL;DR

This paper presents COSMIC-L, a comprehensive photometric catalog of nearly 58 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, derived from SDSS $gri$-band images taken with DECam, aiding studies of galaxy and stellar evolution.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale, calibrated photometric catalog of the LMC with nearly 59 million stars, including detailed image analysis and calibration procedures.

Findings

Catalog contains 57,997,665 stars with $gri$ magnitudes.

Completeness magnitude is approximately 21.

Limiting magnitude is approximately 22.

Abstract

The Magellanic Clouds are two nearby dwarf irregular galaxies whose study can help us in understanding galaxy and stellar evolution. In particular, the Large Magellanic Cloud, the larger one, contains approximately 30 billion stars at various evolutionary stages. In this work, we present an SDSS $gri$-bands photometric analysis based on multiple images acquired with DECam, the Dark Energy Camera, installed on the Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (Chile). We performed a full image analysis and photometric calibration, resulting in a photometric catalog named COSMIC-L, consisting of 57,997,665 stars, of which 18,676,294 contain estimates for all three $gri$ magnitudes, resulting in a completeness magnitude of $\simeq 21$ and a limiting magnitude of $\simeq 22$ in all three bands.