The JCMT Transient Survey: Six Year Summary of 450/850 μm Protostellar Variability and Calibration Pipeline Version 2.0

Abstract

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Transient Survey has been monitoring eight Gould Belt low-mass star-forming regions since 2015 December and six somewhat more distant intermediate-mass star-forming regions since 2020 February with the Submillimeter Common User Bolometer Array 2 on board JCMT at 450 and 850 μ m and with an approximately monthly cadence. We introduce our pipeline v2 relative calibration procedures for image alignment and flux calibration across epochs, improving on our previous pipeline v1 by decreasing measurement uncertainties and providing additional robustness. These new techniques work at both 850 and 450 μ m, where version 1 only allowed investigation of the 850 μ m data. Pipeline v2 achieves better than 0.″5 relative image alignment, less than a tenth of the submillimeter beam widths. The version 2 relative flux calibration is found to be 1% at 850 μ m and <5% at 450 μ m. The improvement in the calibration is demonstrated by comparing the two pipelines over the first 4 yr of the survey and recovering additional robust variables with version 2. Using the full 6 yr of the Gould Belt survey, the number of robust variables increases by 50%, and at 450 μ m we identify four robust variables, all of which are also robust at 850 μ m. The multiwavelength light curves for these sources are investigated and found to be consistent with the variability being due to dust heating within the envelope in response to accretion luminosity changes from the central source.

Keywords

• Astronomical techniques
• Transient sources
• Protostars
• Submillimeter astronomy
• Time domain astronomy