A Comparative Study of TESS Light Curve Extraction Methods Applied to Blazars
The Astrophysical Journal(2024)
摘要
Blazars are characterized by largely aperiodic variability on timescales
ranging from minutes to decades across the electromagnetic spectrum. The TESS
(Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission provides continuous sampling of
blazar variability on timescales ranging from tens of minutes to 27 days for a
single sector observation. Proper removal of the background, thermal ramping,
and onboard systematic effects are crucial to the extraction of a reliable
blazar light curve. Multiple publicly available procedures have been created to
correct for these effects. Using ground based observations from the Zwicky
Transit Facility (ZTF) and the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System
(ATLAS) as “ground truth” observations, we compare 6 different methods
(Regression, Cotrending Basis Vectors (CBV), Pixel Level Decorrelation (PLD),
eleanor, quaver, and simple differential photometry (SDP)) to each other, and
to our “ground truth” observations, to identify which methods properly
correct light curves of a sample of 11 bright blazars, including the suspected
neutrino source TXS 0506+056. In addition to comparing the resulting light
curves, we compare the slopes of the power spectral densities, perform
least-square fitting to simultaneous ZTF data, and quantify other statistical
qualities generated from the light curves of each method. We find that only
three of the six methods compared (Simple Differential Photometry, eleanor, and
quaver) produce TESS light curves consistent with the ground-based ZTF and
ATLAS observations.
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关键词
Blazars,Active galactic nuclei,High energy astrophysics,Astronomy data reduction
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