VIRAC2: NIR astrometry and time series photometry for 500M+ stars from the VVV and VVVX surveys

Leigh C Smith*, Philip W. Lucas, Sergey E. Koposov, Carlos Gonzalez-Fernandez, Javier Alonso-García, Dante Minniti, Jason L. Sanders, Luigi R. Bedin, Vasily Belokurov, N. Wyn Evans, Maren Hempel, Valentin D Ivanov, Radostin G. Kurtev, Roberto K. Saito

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

We present VIRAC2, a catalogue of positions, proper motions, parallaxes and Z, Y, J, H, and Ks near-infrared photometric time series of 545 346 537 unique stars. The catalogue is based on a point spread function fitting reduction of nearly a decade of VISTA VVV and VVVX images, which cover 560 deg2 of the Southern Galactic plane and bulge. The catalogue is complete at the >90 per cent level for 11 < Ks mag < 16 sources, but extends to Ks ≈ 17.5 mag in most fields. Astrometric performance for 11 < Ks mag < 14 sources is typically ≈0.37 mas yr−1 per dimension for proper motion, and 1 mas for parallax. At Ks = 16 the equivalent values are around 1.5 mas yr−1 and 5 mas. These uncertainties are validated against Gaia DR3 and Hubble Space Telescope astrometry. The complete catalogues are available via the ESO archive. We perform an initial search of the catalogue for nearby ultracool dwarf candidates. In total we find 26 new sources whose parallaxes place them within 50 parsecs of the Sun. Among them we find two high-confidence T dwarfs and a number of other sources that appear to lie close to the L/T transition.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3707-3738
Number of pages32
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume536
Issue number4
Early online date20 Dec 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2025

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • parllaxes
  • proper motions
  • brown dwarfs
  • stars: kinematics and dynamics
  • Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics
  • solar neighbourhood

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