An Atlas of TESS Light Curves¶
Many stars appear to vary in brightness over time. Some pulsate; some erupt; some are eclipsed. Over time, we have recognised classes of stars that vary in a similar way and named them, often by the name of the exemplar of that class.
Recently, the search for planets around other stars has motivated the launch of satellites that carefully monitor large numbers of stars. While watching closely for the small dip in a star’s light as its companion crosses its surface, these missions have also generated exquisite light curves—brightnesses as a function of time—of many variable stars. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) stands out for monitoring stars across the sky. TESS regularly records its entire field of view and even more often records regions around a variety of stars selected through proposals from the astronomy community. Thus, unlike other missions that mainly targeted certain classes of star for the sake of planet hunting, TESS has produced many light curves of known and new variable stars across most of the sky.
Here you will find little more than these light curves. You may read more about this document or proceed to the light curves, grouped by class and subclass. The vision is for each star to have a brief description, a portion of the light curve and an additional plot of either a phase-folded light curve, amplitude spectrum or power spectrum, depending on which is most relevant to that class. The chapters and sections introduce some background and characteristics of each class and subclass. The stars appear roughly in a hierarchy of those with Bayer, Flamsteed and Argelander designations, followed by some other bright stars (HR or HD) that I’ve found interesting.
This work has only just begun and will probably never be finished but I hope that you will enjoy paging through as much as I do.