LASR-guided stellar photometric variability subtraction

The Linear Algorithm for Significance Reduction

Department of Physics, University of Idaho, 875 Perimeter Drive MS 0903, Moscow, ID 83844, USA
e-mail: ahle6481@vandals.uidaho.edu

Received: 11 December 2017
Accepted: 9 April 2018

Abstract

We develop a technique for removing stellar variability in the light curves of δ-Scuti and similar stars. Our technique, which we name the Linear Algorithm for Significance Reduction (LASR), subtracts oscillations from a time series by minimizing their statistical significance in frequency space. We demonstrate that LASR can subtract variable signals of near-arbitrary complexity and can robustly handle close frequency pairs and overtone frequencies. We demonstrate that our algorithm performs an equivalent fit as prewhitening to the straightforward variable signal of KIC 9700322. We also show that LASR provides a better fit to seismic activity than prewhitening in the case of the complex δ-Scuti KOI-976.