Our New Paper is Out!
Good news, everyone: our latest paper from Disk Detective has just been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal! You can read it on the arXiv now. In it, we estimate the number of disks we expect to find in Disk Detective, and present over two hundred new disk candidates that have received high-resolution follow-up imaging.
Disk Detective is designed to identify new disk candidates in the AllWISE catalog by eliminating false positives. Because we have such a large catalog and so many classifications that have been made so far (keep them coming!), we can get some statistics on how many objects are false positives, and use that to estimate the number of disks we expect to find. We can also break this down by what kind of false positive we find, and where in the galaxy we find it.
Objects as a function of Galactic latitude. Most objects are in the Galactic plane, and most of those objects are multiples.
In general, “multiples,” objects for which a majority of classifiers clicked “Multiple objects in the Red Circle,” are the most common type of object–more than 70% of the objects in the catalog! Only about 8% of objects are classified as “None of the Above/Good candidate” by a majority of classifiers. These occur most often in the Galactic plane, as you’d expect–if there’s more stars in the Galactic plane, you’d expect to get more disk candidates there. However, multiples become much more common in the Galactic plane, as well–the multiple fraction in the Galactic plane is over 70%!
We looked to see the multiple fraction (the fraction of objects in a given range that were multiples) as a function of Galactic latitude. We expected that these would be most common in the Galactic plane, and fall off as you got further away from it. We found instead that while for the most part this is the case, there’s an additional peak between -30 and -35 degrees Galactic latitude.
So we looked at the multiple fraction as a function of both Galactic latitude and longitude, as shown on this heatmap (brighter = higher multiple fraction), and found that most of those multiples outside the Galactic plane occurred at the same Galactic latitude as the Large Magellanic Cloud–we have multiples caused by stars in nearby dwarf galaxies, too.
In addition to the website classifications, we also review our objects in the literature to ensure that we’re not identifying things that are known to be non-disk sources (like background galaxies). This eliminates an additional 14% of our objects, the remainder of which becomes DDOIs.
Objects with high-resolution follow-up as a function of Galactic latitude. Unlike with the website classification data, there’s no significant difference between in and out of the Galactic plane.
We took high-resolution images of 261 of our DDOIs to see if we could identify faint background objects, fainter than would be detectable in our survey data but bright enough to produce a false positive at W4, using the Robo-AO instrument while it was at Palomar, and RetroCam on the Irenee R. Dupont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. (I wrote about my observing experience at LCO here.) We included some volunteers from our advanced user team in the analysis of this data–they’ll have a blog post up on the details of what they did soon. Overall, we found that 244 of the 261 objects were good disk candidates once faint background objects were taken into account.
Combining all of these, we estimate that only 7.9% of all infrared excess candidates in AllWISE are or will be good disk candidates. That means that we expect to find 21,600 disks in AllWISE, almost double our original estimate!
Estimated false positive fraction for several surveys. Surveys that visually inspect the data (blue) have lower expected false positive rates than surveys that don’t (orange).
We were able to use our false positive rates to estimate how many false positives appear in published disk searches. Many surveys do a good job, but have some false positives due to objects only detectable in high-resolution imaging. Some larger searches, however, seems to be riddled with false positives, including the McDonald et al. (2014) and (2017) searches, and the Marton et al. (2016) search. These searches don’t include a visual inspection of the images, and thus are likely to have high rates of false positives due to multiples at the minimum.
We were also able to leverage the knowledge base of our Disk Detectives to analyze the M dwarf disk candidates of Theissen & West (2014). M dwarf disks are key targets, because very few have been found, despite the abundance of M dwarfs nearby. The advanced user team got together and found a way to analyze the targets as if they were Disk Detective objects (more on this in their blog post coming soon). We found that only 13 of the candidates from Theissen & West (2014) had high enough signal-to-noise for the Disk Detective methodology to apply. Advanced users found flaws with all thirteen, making all of them false positives.
An HR diagram of our candidates with parallaxes from Gaia. Color of each point indicates the disk temperature, while size of each point indicates the strength of the infrared excess. This plot shows that while most of our objects lie on the main sequence (like our Sun does), many others lie off of it. We think that most of the ones off the main sequence are primordial disks.
Finally, we presented a list of 244 disk candidates with follow-up high-resolution imaging, 213 of which are new discoveries by Disk Detective. These seem to be split evenly among debris and YSO disks, though some of those YSO disks could potentially be “extreme” debris disks, which are thought to result from collisions of terrestrial planets. We made some further interesting discoveries among these:
- We found that twelve of our new disks were in comoving pairs (that is, another star nearby to them has similar motion), providing further support to the hypothesis that warm circumstellar dust is associated with binary systems.
- We made the first identification of 22-micron excess around two stars that are known to be in the Scorpius-Centaurus young association, and identified known disk host WISEA J164540.79-310226.6 as a likely member of Sco-Cen, based on its motion through the sky. By identifying these targets as members of Sco-Cen, we give them likely ages, letting us put these on timelines of disk evolution.
- We found thirty-one disk candidates within 125 pc, including 27 debris disks. These are good targets for both direct imaging exoplanet searches, and spatially resolving the disk itself in scattered light–making these targets optimal for observation with the James Webb Space Telescope.
And there’s still more work to be done! We recently hit 76% complete (that is, 76% of all our targets have enough classifications to be retired from the website), but that leaves more than 60,000 excesses to evaluate with your help. We now know how many objects we’re going to find–now it’s our job to finish finding them.
Another Expedition to Chile!
Steven Silverberg from our science team recently traveled to Chile again, as he did in October 2015. Here’s his story on our most recent observing run.
Last December, Disk Detective applied for and was granted time at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Southern Hemisphere counterpart to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. I traveled to Chile last month to conduct the observations.
Due to an issue with flights, I unfortunately missed our planned first night on the telescope. However, I was able to get up to the mountain for nine nights of observations with the 0.9-m telescope, as well as half a night with the 4m Victor Blanco Telescope.
There are quite a few telescopes on the mountain. In addition to the 5 telescopes that belong to CTIO (the 4m Victor Blanco, and the 1.5m, 1.3m, 1.0m, and 0.9m telescopes run by the SMARTS consortium), there are a slew of other projects hosted on the mountain. The collection of domes makes for a rather impressive site–especially when viewed from the lodge at dawn.
Sunrises were a thing of absolute beauty coming over the mountains, from anywhere in the complex. This was from the lodge.
My first nine nights on the mountain were spent with this telescope, the 0.9-m. While not the biggest telescope, it proved quite capable for our mission: monitoring AWI0005x3s (from Paper 2) for flares and other stellar activity. The activity we detect in these observed light curves could give us more information as to its age, and could provide information on how the star and its disk might interact.
The next mountain over (or what seems like it) is Cerro Pachon, home to the SOAR telescope, another telescope run by CTIO. This mountain is also where the Large Synodic Space Telescope (LSST) is currently under construction. Seeing our “neighbors” from the summit of Cerro Tololo was quite nice.
The most notable result from our initial analysis is the light curve from night 4, where we observed this flare. It is rather impressive, both for its duration (~1.8 hours) and its brightness (3 times the non-flare brightness at peak). This flare, any others we find in the light curve, and any other interesting features we find in the light curve will be the subject of a future Disk Detective paper.
Sunrise on the morning of night 5 was particularly beautiful from on top of the mountain.
The view from the dining hall at the lodge was rather spectacular, as well. You can see what appears to be an ancient riverbed in the valley.
Sunsets could be particularly delightful, too. This one’s beauty comes from some rather annoying clouds, but these fortunately never came into play for our target of interest. We had fairly good observing weather throughout the run.
In addition to our time with the 0.9m telescope, we also had time on the 4.1m Victor Blanco Telescope, using the COSMOS instrument. We used this spectrograph to get what we believe is the first optical spectrum recorded of AWI0005x3s. That would give us more accurate information on its spectral type (and temperature), age (to confirm membership in Carina), and potentially radial velocity (also to confirm Carina membership).
All in all, traveling to CTIO was a fantastic experience. I gained some valuable practical experience for future observing runs, and we got what should be some quite good science out of the observations. Keep checking back here, and you should see more on what we learned from our observations soon.
My travel to CASLEO (The El Leoncito Astronomical Complex).
When you find a good candidate at Disk Detective, it goes into our queue to be researched and often to be re-observed. Many of those good candidates that are in the Southern Hemisphere get re-observed from the CASLEO observatory in Argentina, where we split up their light with a spectrograph to find out what kinds of stars they are.
Disk Detective Hugo Durantini Luca lives in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, much closer to the CASLEO observatory than most of us on the Disk Detective science team, but still a long journey away from it. He traveled for more than eighteen hours across the country of Argentina to join a Disk Deective observing run. Hugo spent five days on the mountain with Luciano García (astronomer from Observatorio Astronomico de Cordoba) helping observe good candidates. He wrote down some memories from the trip to share with us. I think you’ll find them as inspiring and poetic as I did!
You can read about his experiences below, and even watch some short videos he took at the observatory:
Dentro de la Cúpula de CASLEO / Inside the CASLEO Dome
Afuera del Observatorio de CASLEO / Outside the CASLEO Observatory
Centro de Control de CASLEO / CASLEO Control Room
My Travel to CASLEO
by Hugo Durantini Luca
Reaching CASLEO requires a little patience. Even if you were to reach the city of San Juan by plane, you still have to endure traveling approximately 5 and half hours more to reach the observatory. The landscape is very interesting, especially if it’s your first time in the region, with the mountains presenting multiple colors and the sight of the Andes while you gradually approach to its foot.
Disk Detective Hugo Durantini Luca in front of the Jorge Sahade Telescope dome at CASLEO.
After getting off the bus to San Juan, I was greeted almost immediately by Luciano García and we started our travel to the observatory after picking up some staff that also was going to the complex to start their work shifts. I don’t know if was because I just had made a 8 and a half hour trip, or if it was because of the landscape and the excitement, but the travel of almost 5 hours from the city to the complex felt pretty quick and we reached the place just in time for lunch.
After that, we checked in to our rooms and I was able to do a small tour to see with my own eyes the telescope along with the instrument what we were about to use: the REOSC Spectrograph. The sensation of seeing all the instruments and the control room in person was almost like going back to my childhood, even though I had previously checked all available information on the internet.
I must say that the first night was a bit hard, not only because at first we lost the first hour or so thanks to the clouds, but also because after we started the work and learned the basics of what we were about to do, fighting the urge to sleep and our biologic clocks was something that required a little technique.
To input the coordinates of the star that we wanted to observe and then to give the order to REOSC to initiate the exposure was a great privilege. I was assigned this task for the whole run. But even repeating this process over and over didn’t diminish the excitement of directly generating new data for our research.
Another amazing experience was to go outside of the telescope and be able to contemplate the Milky Way in a clean and clear sky. I saw details that are impossible to see from the city due to light pollution, treasures that the people that have never left the city or studied astronomy don’t know they are losing.
It was really fun and illuminating for me to participate in all the nights, to watch how the instrument behaved according to the magnitude of the stars. I learned how to add more or less time to obtain a good reading and how in some cases, there is no trick aside from perseverance. All this experience brought me closer to a better understanding of the work of an astronomer beyond all the commons fantasies that one can hold.
The second day was much easier than the first, at least in the sleep management department. Even if your body is still complaining about some things; one can feel how it adapts to the day to night change. The second night was when we ended doing most of our brightest stars because even if they can be a little difficult, there is less exposure time required. I also had the chance, thanks Luciano, to explore and visit a few sites close to the complex. The landscape and autumn colors, views almost like paintings, and the lonely roads added to the unforgettableness of the trip.
All the CASLEO staff that we had the opportunity to interact with were extremely kind and it was like being at home almost all the time. Even though we were just there four days, by the end, I felt like I had been there for a long time. The return trip was somewhat bittersweet. You miss home, but at the same time this experience has reinforced to the max my love for science and especially astronomy.
To pass days far away and entire nights collecting information can look like something disconnected from reality, but it’s actually the opposite. To gain consciousness of the scale of our Galaxy and our place in the universe is an experience that makes you humble, and being able to participate in building our knowledge and understanding of the universe fills me with a sense of obligation to others here in our own world.
Pictures from our Observing Run in Chile
Steven Silverberg from our science team just came back from South America where he went to observe some Disk Detective Objects of Interest with the DuPont telescope. Here’s his story.
We have a program to take high-resolution images in the near-infrared band (between the DSS “IR” band and 2MASS “K” band we use on the Disk Detective site) with the 2.5m DuPont telescope at Las Campañas Observatory, one of the premier observatories in the world. It’s similar to our follow-up program with Robo-AO; the images help us double check for background galaxies and stars that could be lurking very near to our disk candidates, so close to them that they wouldn’t appear in the data we already have. We have access to this telescope in Chile thanks to Johanna Teske, a member of our science team at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Because Johanna couldn’t go on the observing run this time, I went to South America. It was my first time outside the US–very exciting!
The first thing that struck me were the spectacular views. LCO is 2,380 meters (7,810 feet) up in the edge of the Andes. For someone who grew up in the part of Texas that doesn’t have mountains, it was rather incredible.
My first night there was spent shadowing an observer for the Carnegie Supernova Project, an ongoing campaign to fully characterize the behavior of supernovae in multiple bands. Unfortunately, most of this night was wind-ed out. DuPont has a firm wind speed limit of 35 miles per hour; anything above that, and the dome must close.
Most of DuPont’s controls are handled by computer. However, one last panel from the original control board is used for operating the lamps used for calibrating the detector (the dials next to the LCD readout). The rest of the panel has been superceded by computer, hence all the “Do Not Use” signs.
One upside to going nocturnal for telescope time: you’re awake for amazing sunrises and sunsets. In this case, morning twilight on the mountains to the west.
The most impressive feature of the observatory was the mountain on which the twin Magellan telescopes reside. These two telescopes, each 6.5 meters in diameter, loom over the observatory lodge. LCO will eventually (by 2025) be the site of the Giant Magellan Telescope, which (along with telescopes like JWST) could be used to image Disk Detective disks!
There are two other major telescopes at LCO currently: the Swope telescope (in the foreground) and DuPont (centered), where we conducted our observations. These are the two oldest telescopes on-site; the Swope went on-line in 1971, while DuPont came on-line in 1977.
Because of the timing of my visit (right around full moon), I was able to get some excellent images of moon-rise. This one was taken before my first night of observations, which (like the night prior) was mostly lost due to wind. However, we were able to get 19 objects imaged on night 1, despite losing several hours to wind.
The sunrises were absolutely beautiful while I was on-site. I enjoyed taking pictures of them. These are several different captures of the sunrise after night 1 of Disk Detective observations, taken from my room at the lodge.
This was the view looking south from the lodge. The road below is the road back down the mountain from the site. GMT will be built on one of the mountains down here, to the left of this shot.
This is how the observatory looked when viewing from DuPont. Magellan is in the background left; the Swope is in the middle.
The road from DuPont back to the lodge. As one might expect for a mountain in the Atacama desert, the local foliage was rather sparse. The same weather conditions that lead to this sparseness make LCO an amazing site for astronomy.
You could see some snow-capped peaks of the Andes in the distance, which were rather incredible to see in person (albeit not particularly close by).
While on the mountain, I got to use a car reserved for DuPont observers. Having never driven on a mountain before, that was new and different…and a bit frightening. Especially driving down the road above at morning twilight, with limited visibility.
The actual DuPont dome. It was quite big (as one would expect, to house a 2.5-meter telescope).
The actual DuPont 2.5-meter telescope. Rather than use a (rather heavy and difficult to maintain) tube to support the secondary mirror (at the top), this telescope uses a truss to support the secondary mirror. As you can gather, this telescope was rather huge.
To give you an idea of how big this telescope was/is, here’s a picture of just the base, with a nearby staircase for scale. The staircase went up about ten feet.
This was the sunset before my second night of observations, as taken from DuPont. The clarity of the sunset shows just how good the skies are at LCO, making it perfect for astronomy.
The sunset lit up the ridge that most of the telescopes are on beautifully, too…
…as well as the mountains to the west.
The Moon shining down on DuPont during night 2. During the observing run, there were some points where we needed to pause briefly, to let the sky catch up to where the telescope could see.
During my time on DuPont, I worked with two telescope operators. These telescope operators handled the movement of the telescope, taking coordinates I gave them and slewing the telescope to its correct position, as well as adjusting the focus. This freed me up to focus on the astronomy, and made sure that someone who knew what they were doing with this particular telescope (as opposed to me, who had never used it before) was making sure the telescope was operating correctly at all times.
Sunrise at DuPont after night 2, during which we imaged 40 targets. The two bright dots in the sky are Jupiter (the dimmer dot, to the left) and Venus. Mars was up as well.
Sunrise over Magellan. Sunrises were pretty cool here.
While at LCO, I was able to get a few pictures of the European Southern Observatory-La Silla, which is on the next mountain over–the observatory next door, as it were. In fact, La Silla is just down the road from LCO. Seeing La Silla (even from a distance) was rather cool to me, as my home institution (the University of Oklahoma) does ongoing disk research with telescopes there.
There was a decent amount of haze and cloud cover on the third night. While it made for delightful sunset pictures, it also made for a comparatively rough night of astronomy.
DuPont, now with an astronomer for scale, after the last night of observations. The telescope did very well, despite the cloud issues–we were able to image another 39 targets, bringing our total for the observing run to 98 targets imaged.
As the Sun rose after night 3, I tried to get as many images captured as possible, to try and capture everything about the end of the run. This was the sunrise over Magellan.
This was another, closer view of Jupiter and Venus at sunrise. The very faint dot down and to the right from Venus (around 5 o’clock) is Mars!
DuPont served us well on this run. The telescope worked very smoothly, all things considered, and we were able to collect data on ninety-eight Disk Detective Objects of Interest, which we’ll be analyzing soon. Once that’s done, we’ll let you know what all we found from what you found!
A Dwarfs and K Giants
A list of 102 interesting objects that you helped pick for follow up (let us call them Disk Detective Objects of Interest, or DDOIs) shows that many of the stars with disks we locate will be A dwarfs or K giant stars. We don’t yet know all the spectral types of the DDOI stars precisely, but you can see the distribution of the types we do know in the figure below. The peaks correspond to A dwarfs and K giants.
Distribution of DDOIs according to spectral type. The two peaks at AV and K show that most stars hosting disks in our list are stars of type A and K that are about twice as massive as our Sun.
So what are A dwarfs and K giants? “A” dwarfs are very hot, fast spinning and blue stars that are younger and brighter than “G” stars such as our Sun. The bright stars Sirius and Vega are some well known A dwarfs. Many of the best studied debris disks are around A dwarfs.
What are these “K giants”? K giants and A dwarfs are two sides of the same coin. Let’s talk a bit about the life cycle of a typical star.
Most ordinary stars like our Sun burn hydrogen fuel for many millions of years. Once all the hydrogen is used up however, the star balloons in size and becomes a red giant. In the far future when our own Sun becomes a red giant, it will become so big that it will swallow up Mercury, Venus and possibly the Earth. Giants also tend to steadily lose a lot of their own mass all the time. This is because hot winds are blowing off the gas that is part of the star. (This hot gas is tricky because it might be mistaken for a dusty disk)
K giants are former A stars that have evolved for hundreds of millions of years. Like the sun, they have burned through their hydrogen, and ballooned up in size. Both A and K stars are about twice as massive as our Sun.
Left: Artist’s impression of Sirius, and A dwarf. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Bacon
K giants are also really interesting because Jupiter-sized exoplanets orbiting these old, giant stars have been found to be more common than Jupiter-sized exoplanets orbiting less massive stars that are still on the main sequence. These exoplanets around K giants have been found by the popular radial velocity (Doppler shift) method.
Also, some of these K giants have debris disks, sometimes even dustier than their younger counterparts. This is surprising, because giants are very bright and light from the star exerts radiation pressure on small dust particles that ought to blow the dust away, or cause them to slow down and spiral into the star and be swallowed up.
So where is the dust around these K giants coming from? Nobody really knows yet, but there are several hypotheses. One is that dust is coming from the star itself. Another is that the dust is in fact interstellar dust in our galaxy. A third is that giants are breaking up more comets. Whatever the cause, we have a lot of K giants in our list of DDOIs that potentially have dusty disks–so once we can follow these up with telescopes we will be able to help solve this mystery.
Dawoon Jung (@dirkpitt2050) is a graduate student at the International Space University currently at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center doing a summer internship with the Disk Detective team. He was born in Korea, and is interested in exoplanets and space flight.
Herschel image of κ Coronae Borealis 31.1 parsecs away. This K giant is about twice as massive as our Sun. The red regions correspond to dust orbiting the star. Interestingly, this star also hosts at least one exoplanet with a mass of about 2 Jupiters. Credit: Bonsor et al. 2013.
Follow-Up Observing Begins!
In our last blog post, we invited you to submit interesting targets to follow up with the Tillinghast 1.5m telescope at Mt. Hopkins this spring. Thank you to jessicamh, Gez Quiruga, arvintan, kmasterdo, silviug, wtaskew, cpitney, Pini2013, Ted91, Vinokurov, michiharu and everyone else who submitted targets! Thanks to your help, we picked out 102 objects to follow up this spring. The observing starts tomorrow night.
And guess what? We’ve got more follow-up observing planned for the fall semester, and also for the Southern hemisphere, with help from our new collaborators, Luciano Garcia and Mercedes Gomez from Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba and Christoph Baranec from the University of Hawaii.
So we’re keeping that target submission form open. From now on, whenever you find an interesting target, anywhere in the sky, feel free to submit it.
And now that we’ve been through this process, I can better explain how we decided what to follow up this time. This part of the blog post is going to be a bit technical–so feel free to skip it, or ask us for more info if you get tripped up by the jargon.
We started by searching SIMBAD and VizieR for information on each object, keeping the search radius to 0.2 arcminutes. These are the kinds of objects we most want to follow up:
Main sequence stars (aka dwarfs)
Luminosity Class IV stars: A IV, F IV, G IV, K IV, M IV.
A III, F III, G III and K III stars
T Tauri stars and Herbig Ae stars
white dwarfs
objects with distance < 200 parsecs
objects with proper motion > 30 milliarcsec/year
shell stars
We generally don’t want to follow up:
M giants
Cepheids
Be stars
galaxies, Active Galactic Nuclei
blends (i.e. two objects so close together that we can’t analyze them separately)
eclipsing binaries
O stars
supergiants
Also mixed in the lists of possible targets were:
binary stars
known disks
and plenty of objects where we can’t tell what it is
These objects went onto a “Maybe” list, to be followed-up as second priorities.
We could read some of this information from the SIMBAD spectral type. The quality of this information varies, and the SIMBAD spectral type includes a data quality letter (A,B,C,D, or E) where A is the best. Since the purpose of this observing run is to weed out blends and to get more accurate spectral types, we figured it was OK to look at objects where the spectral type quality was poor. But we threw out objects classified in SIMBAD or VizieR as M giants, Cepheids, Be stars, galaxies, Active Galactic Nuclei, eclipsing binaries, O stars or supergiants.
The most common contaminants are M giants and supergiants. We want to avoid those. But some M stars are main sequence stars (dwarfs). Like this one: AWI00003dm Disks around these M dwarfs are rare and interesting and worth extra points! So we must be careful weeding out the M giants and supergiants.
M giants are sneaky! They come with many different labels in SIMBAD and VizieR: Long Period Variables (LPVs), SR+L, Slow Irregular Variables, Miras, Semi-regular Variables, Semiregular pulsating Variables, Carbon stars. All those are kinds of M giants/supergiants and they tend to make their own dust, so we can’t use dust around them as an indicator of a planetary system. We’re not following them up.
M dwarf disks are exciting but rare. Here’s a Hubble picture of one around a star called AU Microscopii.
Sometimes you can spot an M giant even when there’s no known spectral type. For example, subtract the V magnitude from the K magnitude. If V – K > 3.29, you’re looking at an M star. Then, if a star has a measured distance of thousands of parsecs, you can bet it’s a giant or supergiant. So we declared some objects to be M giants based on color and distance. A real M dwarf is so faint we can only see it if is much closer than 100 parsecs.
Here’s more information about how to guess a star’s spectral type based on its color: http://www.stsci.edu/~inr/intrins.html
If you know you’re looking at an M star, another good clue that it’s a giant/supergiant is if it is highly variable (e.g. amplitude more than one magnitude). So we looked up the variability amplitude for our targets in VizieR as well.
For an M star with no parallax measurement and no variability measurement, it can be hard to tell if you’re looking at a dwarf of giant or supergiant. So I put objects like that on the “maybe” list.
And finally–all the subjects on Disk Detective are preselected to have a certain degree of redness (we require the WISE 4 magnitude to be at most the WISE 1 magnitude – 0.25). But that’s not sufficient to find M star debris disks, since M stars are so cold, and therefore intrinsically red colored. We had to additionally weed out M stars with WISE 4 magnitude > WISE 1 magnitude + 1.0. (I know that sounds terribly confusing–it’s confusing because in the astronomical magnitude system, brighter objects have lower magnitudes. But adding this second criterion says that we are being more demanding when it comes to M stars in terms of how much brighter they need to be in the WISE 4 band than the WISE 1 band.)
Whew—that’s a lot of detail, I know. But now you can see why we try to weed out all those blends and multiples etc. using the handy animated flipbooks on the DiskDetective site before we start all the detailed research on each one.
Here are all the objects on our current version of the follow-up list for the Tillinghast 1.5 m for this spring, below (this list includes the maybes). Thanks again for all your hard work. And keep our fingers crossed for good weather at Mt. Hopkins!
Marc
| Zooniverse ID |
| AWI0000bs0 |
| AWI0000tjx |
| AWI0000gjb |
| AWI0000fye |
| AWI0000kg4 |
| AWI0000ojv |
| AWI0000tz1 |
| AWI0000u8s |
| AWI0000uj2 |
| AWI0000uji |
| AWI0000w9x |
| AWI0000ibq |
| AWI0000v1z |
| AWI00006nk |
| AWI00000wz |
| AWI0000tgc |
| AWI00002ms |
| AWI0000cot |
| AWI0000nwt |
| AWI00002zo |
| AWI0000m2p |
| AWI0000ns8 |
| AWI00004o8 |
| AWI000050r |
| AWI0000hjr |
| AWI000048c |
| AWI00005uf |
| AWI00000o6 |
| AWI00001l8 |
| AWI00002yt |
| AWI0000hog |
| AWI0000kk6 |
| AWI0000eg6 |
| AWI000004g |
| AWI00007qu |
| AWI000001j |
| AWI00001q1 |
| AWI00005xz |
| AWI00006bt |
| AWI00004qc |
| AWI00000zp |
| AWI0000kgo |
| AWI00007dp |
| AWI00000om |
| AWI00006dp |
| AWI0000149 |
| AWI000011b |
| AWI0000l8w |
| AWI0000us7 |
| AWI0000gz9 |
| AWI000028h |
| AWI0000vk9 |
| AWI0000jo8 |
| AWI000015r |
| AWI00000au |
| AWI000066t |
| AWI00002xh |
| AWI00006kc |
| AWI0000632 |
| AWI0000np1 |
| AWI00002fw |
| AWI00006p0 |
| AWI0000ajw |
| AWI00007i1 |
| AWI000047d |
| AWI0000tpu |
| AWI0000qxd |
| AWI0000hat |
| AWI000055c |
| AWI0000wip |
| AWI00006b3 |
| AWI0000tsh |
| AWI00002hx |
| AWI000054k |
| AWI00001sw |
| AWI0000r07 |
| AWI0000t35 |
| AWI0000a7e |
| AWI000019z |
| AWI0000s7e |
| AWI0000wqx |
| AWI00005x2 |
| AWI000042e |
| AWI0000aoe |
| AWI00004ox |
| AWI00000lj |
| AWI00000my |
| AWI000034n |
| AWI00004c1 |
| AWI00005ko |
| AWI00006hl |
| AWI00006nb |
| AWI00007fu |
| AWI00007ne |
| AWI0000c02 |
| AWI0000l70 |
| AWI0000s8t |
| AWI00006m2 |
| AWI000072k |
| AWI0000qnj |
| AWI000016c |
Disk Detective 