Monday, May 6, 2013

KIC 5879583 Unlisted RR Lyrae Star



Contaminated Star  KIC 5879574 in Q2 at Planet Hunters

Planet Hunters forum Talk member Tom128 posted the unusual light curve above for KIC 5879574 in Kepler Q2. At that time Kian Jek commented:
Possible #contamination from KID 5879583 (not a Kepler target) but is a nearby A star. RRL lightcurve (on detrend) but class is G.
Unfortunately, the contaminator star was never followed up at Planet Hunters until recently when Talk member Cappella found  KIC 5879583 to have been targeted by Kepler in Q14.

Kian Jek:

If two years ago we'd known how to do the kind of APO/TPF contamination analysis, we'd have fingered the Type A star known then as #5 on the Skyview as the likely RRL Type A, and it would have been the 2nd RRL to be discovered through Kepler LC blending, a testament to the fidelity of Kepler's CCDs.
Here's the LC of the contaminated star, KIC 5879574, the APOs are startling - they are humongous, at nearly 100 millipixels, and you can make out that the contaminant even has Blazhko modulation:



The APO vector points roughly in the direction of our 5879583 - the green arrow is in the direction of flux maxima:





and the TPF (flipped and rotated to N is up, sky orientation) shows that the halo pixels in the same direction are the ones with the RRL modulation:


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