Abstract
As a monitoring mission the NASA Kepler K2 mission offers the opportunity to search for long period variables, in this case along the ecliptic plane. The usability of K2 for this search is limited since the observing period of an individual target is restricted to about 80 days. However, this time scale allows detecting LPVs and making at least a rough estimate of the period length. Since no ready-to-use light curves were provided during the early phases of the K2 mission, we had to use a reduction algorithm developed by our group based on the experiences from the primary Kepler mission. Our results can now be nicely compared with the K2’ High Level Science Products’ released in June 2016. The first results of our study up to campaign 3 are presented.
Highlights
Long period variables (LPVs) are highly evolved stars of low and intermediate mass. They are characterized by large amplitude variations in the visual, periods of a few 10 to several 100 days and very red colour due to both the low surface temperature and the circumstellar reddening by dust
An additional selection criterion was the availability of basic information from Simbad, GSC 2.3, 2MASS, and AAVSO data bases to ensure we select stellar objects only
We calculated the background from pixels around the mask and tested two strategies to remove this trend from the target pixel data (TPD):
Summary
Long period variables (LPVs) are highly evolved stars of low and intermediate mass. We were interested in detecting highly reddened long period variables (LPVs), which is a main group of stars found with these selection criteria. To focus on these objects we set a lower period limit of 10 days. It turned out that stars with magnitudes
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