No Arabic abstract
We report the discovery of 30 type a,b RR Lyrae (RRab) which are likely members of the Sagittarius (Sgr) dwarf galaxy. Accurate positions, periods, amplitudes and magnitudes are presented. Their distances are determined with respect to RRab in the Galactic bulge found also in the MACHO 1993 data. For R$_{odot} = 8$ kpc, the mean distance to these stars is $D = 22 pm 1$ kpc, smaller than previous determinations for this galaxy. This indicates that Sgr has an elongated main body extending for more than 10 kpc, which is inclined along the line of sight, with its northern part (in Galactic coordinates) closer to us. The size and shape of Sgr give clues about the past history of this galaxy. If the shape of Sgr follows the direction of its orbit, the observed spatial orientation suggests that Sgr is moving away from the Galactic plane. Also, Sgr stars may be the sources of some of the microlensing events seen towards the bulge.
We have obtained single-phase near-infrared magnitudes in the J and K bands for a sample of 78 RR Lyrae stars in the Sculptor dSph galaxy. Applying different theoretical and empirical calibrations of the period-luminosity-metallicity relation for RR Lyrae stars in the infrared, we find consistent results and obtain a true, reddening-corrected distance modulus of 19.67 $pm$ 0.02 (statistical) $pm$ 0.12 (systematic) mag for Sculptor from our data. This distance value is consistent with the value of 19.68 $pm$ 0.08 mag which we obtain from earlier V-band data of RR Lyrae stars in Sculptor, and the V magnitude-metallicity calibration of Sandage (1993). It is also in a very good agreement with the results obtain by Rizzi (2002) based on tip of the red giant branch (TRGB, 19.64 $pm$ 0.08 mag) and horizontal branch (HB, 19.66 $pm$ 0.15 mag).
We have obtained single-phase near-infrared (NIR) magnitudes in the J- and K-bands for 77 RR Lyrae (RRL) stars in the Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy. We have used different theoretical and empirical NIR period-luminosity-metallicity calibrations for RRL stars to derive their absolute magnitudes, and found a true, reddening-corrected distance modulus of 20.818 +/- 0.015 (statistical) +/- 0.116 (systematic) mag. This value is in excellent agreement with the results obtained within the Araucaria Project from the NIR photometry of red clump stars (20.858 +/- 0.013 mag), the tip of the red giant branch (20.84 +/- 0.04 +/- 0.14 mag), as well as with other independent distance determinations to this galaxy. The effect of metallicity and reddening is substantially reduced in the NIR domain, making this method a robust tool for accurate distance determination at the 5 percent level. This precision is expected to reach the level of 3 percent once the zero points of distance calibrations are refined thanks to the Gaia mission. NIR period-luminosity-metallicity relations of RRL stars are particularly useful for distance determinations to galaxies and globular clusters up to 300 kpc, that lack young standard candles, like Cepheids.
Thousands of RR Lyrae stars have been observed by the textit{Kepler} space telescope so far. We developed a photometric pipeline tailored to the light variations of these stars, called the Extended Aperture Photometry (EAP). We present the comparison of our photometric solutions for Campaigns 0 through 6 with the other pipelines available, e.g., SAP/PDCSAP, K2P2, EVEREST, and others. We focus on the problems caused by instrumental effects and the detectability of the low-amplitude additional modes.
The textit{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.
We present the method of the Extended Aperture Photometry (EAP) that we applied to K2 RR Lyrae stars. Our aim is to minimize the instrumental variations of attitude control maneuvers by using apertures that cover the positional changes in the field of view thus contain the stars during the whole observation. We present example light curves that we compared to the light curves from the K2 Systematics Correction (K2SC) pipeline applied to the automated Single Aperture Photometry (SAP) and to the Pre-search Data Conditioning Simple Aperture Photometry (PDCSAP) data.