HEASARC Browse: List of COROT Catalogs

List of COROT Catalogs

CoRoT was a space astronomy mission devoted to the study of the variability with time of stars' brightness, with an extremely high accuracy (100 times better than from the ground), for very long durations (up to 150 days) and with a very high duty cycle (more than 90%). The mission was led by CNES in association with four French laboratories, and 7 participating countries and agencies (Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Spain, and the ESA Science Programme). The satellite is composed of a PROTEUS platform (the 3rd in the series), and a unique instrument: a stellar photometer. It was launched on December 27th, 2006 on a Soyuz Rocket, from Baikonour. The mission has lasted almost 6 years (the nominal 3 years duration and a 3 years extension) and has observed more than 160,000 stars. It suddenly stopped sending data on November 2nd, 2012.

CoRoT performed Ultra High Precision Photometry of Stars to detect and characterize the variability of their luminosity with two main objectives: (i) the variability of the object itself: oscillations, rotation, magnetic activity, etc.; (ii) variability due to external causes such as bodies in orbit around the star: planets and companion stars.

The original scientific objectives were focused on the study of stellar pulsations (asteroseismology) to probe the internal structure of stars, and the detection of small exoplanets through their transit in front of their host star, and the measurement of their sizes.

This lead to the introduction of two modes of observations, working simultaneously:

- The bright star mode dedicated to very precise seismology of a small sample (171) of bright and nearby stars (presented in the file named "Bright_star.dat" in the CDS version at ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/B/corot/): these data are not included in this HEASARC table, notice;

- The faint star mode, observing a very large number of stars at the same time, to detect transits, which are rare events, as they imply the alignment of the star, the planet and the observer (these data are presented in the file named "Faint_star.dat" in the CDS version at ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/B/corot/): this HEASARC table is based on this sample. The large amount of data gathered in this mode mode turned out to be extremely fruitful for many topics of stellar physics.

Due to project constraints, two regions of the sky were accessible (circles of 10 degrees centered on the equator around Right Ascensions of 06^h 50^m and 18^h 50^m). They are called the CoRoT 'eyes': the first one is called the "anticenter" eye, whereas the second one is called the "center eye". Each pointing covers 1.4 x 2.8 square degrees.

The CoRoT project is still processing the data, aiming at removing instrumental artifacts and defects. Therefore the format and content of the catalog is still somewhat evolving. More details on the data can be found in the file http://idoc-corotn2-public.ias.u-psud.fr/jsp/doc/CoRoT_N2_versions_30sept2014.pdf. More details on the CoRoT N2 data may be found in the documentation file http://idoc-corotn2-public.ias.u-psud.fr/jsp/doc/DescriptionN2v1.5.pdf.

This HEASARC table contains information on stars observed by CoRoT in its exoplanet detection program. A few percent of these stars have 2 entries since they were observed in different windows (as specified by the corot_window_id parameter) in a subsequent observing run to the initial run in which they were observed. Each entry in this table corresponds to the unique specification of target and corot_window_id, each with a link to its associated N2 data products.

The original names of the parameters in this table, as given in the CoRoT mission documentation, are given in square brackets at the end of the parameter descriptions listed below.

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