Abstract :

We present point-source photometry from the Spitzer Space Telescope's final survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We mapped nearly 30 deg² in two epochs in 2017, with the second extending to early 2018 at 3.6 and 4.5 μm using the Infrared Array Camera. This survey duplicates the footprint from the SAGE-SMC program in 2008. Together, these surveys cover a nearly 10 yr temporal baseline in the SMC. We performed aperture photometry on the mosaicked maps produced from the new data. We did not use any prior catalogs as inputs for the extractor in order to be sensitive to any moving objects (e.g., foreground brown dwarfs) and other transient phenomena (e.g., cataclysmic variables or FU Ori–type eruptions). We produced a point-source catalog with high-confidence sources for each epoch as well as a combined-epoch catalog. For each epoch and the combined-epoch data, we also produced a more complete archive with lower-confidence sources. All of these data products will be made available to the community at the Infrared Science Archive.

Publication : The Astronomical Journal, Volume 167, Issue 4, id.149, 16 pp.
DOI : 10.3847/1538-3881/ad2601 
Bibcode : 2024AJ....167..149K 
Keywords : Small Magellanic Cloud; Infrared photometry; Celestial objects catalogs; 1468; 792; 212; Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies; Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics