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Published February 2017 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

The Faintest WISE Debris Disks: Enhanced Methods for Detection and Verification

Abstract

In an earlier study, we reported nearly 100 previously unknown dusty debris disks around Hipparcos main-sequence stars within 75 pc by selecting stars with excesses in individual WISE colors. Here, we further scrutinize the Hipparcos 75 pc sample to (1) gain sensitivity to previously undetected, fainter mid-IR excesses and (2) remove spurious excesses contaminated by previously unidentified blended sources. We improve on our previous method by adopting a more accurate measure of the confidence threshold for excess detection and by adding an optimally weighted color average that incorporates all shorter-wavelength WISE photometry, rather than using only individual WISE colors. The latter is equivalent to spectral energy distribution fitting, but only over WISE bandpasses. In addition, we leverage the higher-resolution WISE images available through the unWISE.me image service to identify contaminated WISE excesses based on photocenter offsets among the W3- and W4-band images. Altogether, we identify 19 previously unreported candidate debris disks. Combined with the results from our earlier study, we have found a total of 107 new debris disks around 75 pc Hipparcos main-sequence stars using precisely calibrated WISE photometry. This expands the 75 pc debris disk sample by 22% around Hipparcos main-sequence stars and by 20% overall (including non-main-sequence and non-Hipparcos stars).

Additional Information

© 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 October 19; revised 2016 November 26; accepted 2016 December 2; published 2017 January 9. We thank Dustin Lang for help with downloading images for our entire sample from the unWISE image service. We would like to acknowledge assistance from Melissa Louie, who provided suggestions to improve figure aesthetics. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We also use data products from the Two Micron All 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 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. This research has also made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. This research has made use of the Washington Double Star Catalog maintained at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Most of the figures in this work were created using Matplotlib, a Python graphics environment (Hunter 2007). This research also made use of APLpy, an open-source plotting package for Python hosted at http://aplpy.github.com (Robitaille & Bressert 2012). This work is partially supported by NASA Origins of Solar Systems through subcontract no. 1467483 to S.A.M. at Stony Brook University, and by an NSERC Discovery award to S.A.M. at the University of Western Ontario.

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Published - Patel_2017_AJ_153_54.pdf

Submitted - 1612.04818v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023