The KELT Follow-up Network and Transit False-positive Catalog: Pre-vetted False Positives for TESS

Creators: Collins, Karen A.; Berriman, G. Bruce; Good, John C.; Calchi Novati, S.; Ciardi, David R.; Fulton, Benjamin J.; Mawet, Dimitri

Abstract

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project has been conducting a photometric survey of transiting planets orbiting bright stars for over 10 years. The KELT images have a pixel scale of ~23'' pixel^(−1)—very similar to that of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)—as well as a large point-spread function, and the KELT reduction pipeline uses a weighted photometric aperture with radius 3'. At this angular scale, multiple stars are typically blended in the photometric apertures. In order to identify false positives and confirm transiting exoplanets, we have assembled a follow-up network (KELT-FUN) to conduct imaging with spatial resolution, cadence, and photometric precision higher than the KELT telescopes, as well as spectroscopic observations of the candidate host stars. The KELT-FUN team has followed-up over 1600 planet candidates since 2011, resulting in more than 20 planet discoveries. Excluding ~450 false alarms of non-astrophysical origin (i.e., instrumental noise or systematics), we present an all-sky catalog of the 1128 bright stars (6 < V < 13) that show transit-like features in the KELT light curves, but which were subsequently determined to be astrophysical false positives (FPs) after photometric and/or spectroscopic follow-up observations. The KELT-FUN team continues to pursue KELT and other planet candidates and will eventually follow up certain classes of TESS candidates. The KELT FP catalog will help minimize the duplication of follow-up observations by current and future transit surveys such as TESS.

Additional Information

© 2018 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2018 March 2; revised 2018 September 13; accepted 2018 September 18; published 2018 November 1. The authors thank the anonymous reviewer and scientific editor for helpful suggestions regarding both form and content. We also thank other KELT-FUN participants who enabled, gathered, and/or reduced data for this project, including Michael Endl, Chas Beichman, Lars Buchhave, Debra Fischer, Ian Crossfield, Rahul Patel, and many others. This project makes use of data from the KELT survey, including support from The Ohio State University, Vanderbilt University, and Lehigh University, along with the KELT follow-up collaboration. Work performed by J.E.R. was supported by the Harvard Future Faculty Leaders Postdoctoral fellowship. D.J.S. and B.S.G. were partially supported by NSF CAREER grant AST-1056524. Early work on KELT-North was supported by NASA grant NNG04GO70G. Work by S.V.Jr. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-1343012 and the David G. Price Fellowship in Astronomical Instrumentation. Work by G.Z. is provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51402.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. K.K.M. acknowledges the support of the Theodore Dunham, Jr. Fund for Astronomical Research and the NASA Massachusetts Space Grant consortium. J.R.C. acknowledges partial support from NASA grant NNX14AB85G. D.W.L., K.A.C., and S.N.Q. acknowledge partial support from the TESS Mission. M.D.J., D.C.S., and E.G.H. thank the Brigham Young University College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences for continued support of the WMO and OPO research facilities. This paper includes data taken at The McDonald Observatory of The University of Texas at Austin. Research at the Phillips Academy Observatory is supported by the Israel Family Foundation and the Abbot Academy Association. This work is partially based on observations obtained with the 1.54 m telescope at Estación Astrofísica de Bosque Alegre dependent on the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. This research made use of Montage. It is funded by the National Science Foundation under grant number ACI-1440620, and was previously funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology. This work makes use of observations from the LCOGT network. We thank TÜBİTAK for the partial support in using T100 telescope with project number 16CT100-1096. Authors from Ankara University also acknowledge the support by the research fund of Ankara University (BAP) through the project 13B4240006. This work has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System, the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, the SIMBAD database operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France. We make use of Filtergraph, an online data visualization tool developed at Vanderbilt University through the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics (VIDA). We also used data products from the Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; 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. MINERVA is a collaboration among the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, the University of Montana, and the University of New South Wales. MINERVA is made possible by generous contributions from its collaborating institutions and Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation, The David & Lucile Packard Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (EPSCOR grant NNX13AM97A), The Australian Research Council (LIEF grant LE140100050), and the National Science Foundation (grants 1516242 and 1608203). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The National Geographic Society—Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society. The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory. The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (later the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council), until 1988 June, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The blue plates of the southern Sky Atlas and its Equatorial Extension (together known as the SERC-J), as well as the Equatorial Red (ER), and the Second Epoch [red] Survey (SES) were all taken with the UK Schmidt. All data are subject to the copyright given in the copyright summary. Copyright information specific to individual plates is provided in the downloaded FITS headers. Supplemental funding for sky-survey work at the ST ScI is provided by the European Southern Observatory. Software: AstroImageJ (Collins et al. 2017), FilterGraph (Burger et al. 2013), ISIS (Alard & Lupton 1998; Alard 2000), TAPIR (Jensen 2013).

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