Extended Aperture Photometry of K2 RR Lyrae stars

Plachy, Emese; Molnár, László; Bódi, Attila; Skarka, Marek; Szabó, Pál; Szabó, Róbert; Klagyivik, Péter; Sódor, Ádám; Pope, Benjamin J. S.
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series

Advertised on:
10
2019
Number of authors
9
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
21
Refereed citations
16
Description
The Kepler Space Telescope observed thousands of RR Lyrae stars in the K2 mission. In this paper, we present our photometric solutions using extended apertures in order to conserve the flux of the stars to the highest possible extent. With this method, we are able to avoid most of the problems that RR Lyrae light curves produced by other pipelines suffer from. For post-processing, we apply the K2SC pipeline to our light curves. We provide the EAP (Extended Aperture Photometry) of 432 RR Lyrae stars observed in campaigns 3, 4, 5, and 6. We also provide subclass classifications based on Fourier parameters. We investigated in particular the presence of the Blazhko effect in the stars and found it to be 44.7% among the RRab stars, in agreement with results from independent samples. We found that the amplitude and phase modulation in the Blazhko stars may behave rather differently, at least over the length of a K2 Campaign. We also identified four anomalous Cepheid candidates in the sample, one of which is potentially the first Blazhko-modulated member of its class.