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Published December 2014 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

A Technique to Derive Improved Proper Motions for Kepler Objects of Interest

Abstract

We outline an approach yielding proper motions with higher precision than exists in present catalogs for a sample of stars in the Kepler field. To increase proper-motion precision, we combine first-moment centroids of Kepler pixel data from a single season with existing catalog positions and proper motions. We use this astrometry to produce improved reduced-proper-motion diagrams, analogous to a Hertzsprung–Russell (H-R) diagram, for stars identified as Kepler objects of interest. The more precise the relative proper motions, the better the discrimination between stellar luminosity classes. Using UCAC4 and PPMXL epoch 2000 positions (and proper motions from those catalogs as quasi-Bayesian priors), astrometry for a single test Channel (21) and Season (0) spanning 2 yr yields proper motions with an average per-coordinate proper-motion error of 1.0 mas yr^(−1), which is over a factor of three better than existing catalogs. We apply a mapping between a reduced-proper-motion diagram and an H-R diagram, both constructed using Hubble Space Telescope parallaxes and proper motions, to estimate Kepler object of interest K-band absolute magnitudes. The techniques discussed apply to any future small-field astrometry as well as to the rest of the Kepler field.

Additional Information

© 2014 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 June 20; accepted 2014 August 15; published 2014 October 30. Based on observations made with the NASA Kepler Telescope. This paper includes data collected by the Kepler mission. Funding for Kepler is provided by the NASA Science Mission directorate. All of the Kepler data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX13AC07G and by other grants and contracts. Direct support for this work was provided to G.F.B. by NASA through grant NNX13AC22G. Direct support for this work was provided to A.M.T. by NASA through grant NNX12AF76G. P.A.C. acknowledges NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics grant AST-1109612. This publication makes use of data products from the TwoMicronAll Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by NASA and the NSF. This research has made use of the SIMBAD and Vizier databases and Aladin, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France; the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by JPL, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the NASA; and NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service. This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. G.F.B. thanks Bill Jefferys, Tom Harrison, and Barbara McArthur who, over many years, contributed to the techniques reported in this paper. G.F.B. and A.M.T. thank Dave Monet for several stimulating discussions that should have warned us off from this project, but did not. G.F.B. thanks Debra Winegarten for her able assistance, allowing progress on this project. We thank an anonymous referee for a thorough, careful, and useful review which materially improved the final paper.

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Published - 1538-3881_148_6_108.pdf

Submitted - 1408.4054v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023