They Might Be Giants: An Efficient Color-based Selection of Red Giant Stars
Publication information:
Conroy C, Bonaca A, Naidu RP, Eisenstein DJ, Johnson BD, Dotter A, Finkbeiner DP. They Might Be Giants: An Efficient Color-based Selection of Red Giant Stars. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 2018;861.
Abstract
We present a color-based method for identifying red giants based on thePan-STARRS grz and WISE W1 and W2 photometry. We utilize a subsample ofbright stars with precise parallaxes from Gaia’s second datarelease (DR2) to verify that the color-based selection reliablyseparates dwarfs from giants. The selection is conservative in the sense