Methods for the Detection of Stellar Rotation Periods in Individual TESS Sectors and Results from the Prime Mission

Abstract

For ongoing studies of the role of rotation in stellar evolution, we require large catalogs of rotation periods for testing and refining gyrochronology. While there is a wealth of data from the Kepler and K2 missions, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) presents both an opportunity and a challenge: despite its all-sky coverage, rotation periods remain hard to detect. We analyzed individual TESS sectors to detect short-period stellar rotation, using only parameters measured from light curves for a robust and unbiased method of evaluating detections. We used random forest classifiers for vetting, trained on a large corpus of period measurements in Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope data from the Oelkers et al. catalog and using TESS full-frame image light curves generated by eleanor. Finally, using data from the first 26 sectors of TESS, we analyzed 432,704 2 minutes cadence single-sector light curves for FGKM dwarfs. We detected 16,800 periods in individual sector light curves, covering 10,909 distinct targets, and we present a catalog of the median period for each target as measured by a Lomb–Scargle periodogram.