The TESS All-Sky Rotation Survey: Periods for 1,046,317 Stars Within 500 pc

TL;DR

The TESS All-Sky Rotation Survey (TARS) provides rotation periods for over one million stars within 500 pc, significantly expanding the available data for stellar evolution and Galactic studies.

Contribution

This work delivers the largest homogeneous catalog of stellar rotation periods from TESS data and introduces a method to recover long periods reliably from single sectors.

Findings

Catalog includes 1,046,317 stars with estimated 93% rotation periods.

Increases rotation period data for stars within 100 pc by 2.3 times.

Reliable recovery of periods up to 25 days from a single TESS sector.

Abstract

Stellar rotation is a fundamental tracer of stellar magnetic evolution, age, and activity, with broad implications for Galactic archaeology and exoplanet characterization. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) provides high-precision time-series photometry across the sky, enabling rotation measurements for an unprecedented number of stars. We present the TESS All-Sky Rotation Survey (TARS), an all-sky catalog of stellar variability periods for 1,046,317 stars with T < 16 and distances within 500 pc. We estimate that 93% of these periods are rotation periods. This catalog increases the number of rotation period measurements for stars with T < 16 within 100 pc by a factor of 2.3 and within 500 pc by 4.0. We also present a method to correct half-period aliases in TESS data and show that it reliably recovers periods as long as 25 days from a single TESS sector. TARS represents the largest homogeneous catalog of stellar rotation periods to date, providing a foundation for studies of stellar ages, young associations, and Galactic structure. We make the light curves used in our analysis available as a HLSP through MAST. Beyond the default TARS catalog, we provide code that allows users to generate rotation period catalogs with adjustable completeness and reliability thresholds. This code and all rotation period measurements are available through Zenodo.