Recalibration of the Landolt UBVRI Standard Stars and the Generation of 5.4 Million New UBVRI Standard Stars using LAMOST and Gaia

TL;DR

This paper recalibrates Landolt standard stars using extensive survey data, identifies systematic offsets, and generates a large catalog of 5.4 million new UBVRI standard stars with improved photometric precision.

Contribution

It introduces a new recalibration of Landolt standards and creates a comprehensive catalog of 5.4 million UBVRI standard stars based on LAMOST and Gaia data.

Findings

Zero-point offsets between 2013 and 2016 datasets identified.

Spatial structures in calibration data characterized.

New catalog of 5.4 million standard stars generated.

Abstract

We present an independent validation and recalibration of the Landolt 2013 (celestial equator and $\delta \sim -50^\circ$) and 2016 ($\delta \sim -50^\circ$) standard stars in the Johnson $UBV$ and Kron-Cousins $RI$ systems, using tens of thousands of XPSP data from the BEst STar (BEST) database. Our analysis reveals an overall zero-point offset between the 2016 and 2013 datasets. We further identify zero-point offsets for each standard field, ranging from 5 -- 14 mmag across all $UBVRI$ bands, with correlations between offsets in different bands. Additionally, we confirm the spatial structures up to 7 -- 10 mmag in the $BVRI$ bands. We also find that spatial structures are similar across bands for the same field, and similar across different fields for the same band. These similarities may arise from the averaged flat-fields from each observing run. The recalibrated results are consistent with the XPSP data within 48 mmag in the $U$ band, 11 mmag in the $B$ band, and 5 -- 6 mmag in the $VRI$ bands in the brightness $G<16$. Furthermore, based on stellar atmospheric parameters from LAMOST DR12 and Gaia DR3 photometry, along with the XPSP data, we derive temperature- and extinction-dependent extinction coefficients for the $UBVRI$ bands as well as a LAMOST \& Gaia-based catalog of 5.4 million standard stars in the $UBVRI$ bands, for which the U-band photometry of the vast majority of sources exhibits significantly higher precision than XPSP. The recalibrated Landolt standard stars and LAMOST \& Gaia-based standard stars will be available on the BEST website (https://nadc.china-vo.org/data/best/) and (https://doi.org/10.12149/101704).