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[submitted] backtrack: fit relative motion of candidate direct imaging sources with background proper motion and parallax

Directly imaged planet candidates (high contrast point sources near bright stars) are often validated, among other supporting lines of evidence, by comparing their observed motion against the projected motion of a background source due to the proper motion of the bright star and the parallax motion due to the Earth's orbit. Often, the "background track" is constructed assuming an interloping point source is at infinity and has no proper motion itself, but this assumption can fail, producing false positive results, for crowded fields or insufficient observing time-baselines (e.g. Nielsen et al. 2017). `backtrack` is a tool for constructing background proper motion and parallax tracks for validation of high contrast candidates. It can produce classical infinite distance, stationary background tracks, but was constructed in order to fit finite distance, non-stationary tracks using nested sampling (and can be used on clusters). The code sets priors on parallax based on the relations in Bailer-Jones et al. 2021 that are fit to Gaia eDR3 data, and are therefore representative of the galactic stellar density. The public example currently reproduces the results of Nielsen et al. 2017 and Wagner et al. 2022, demonstrating that the motion of HD 131399A "b" is fit by a finite distance, non-stationary background star, but the code has been tested and validated on proprietary datasets. The code is open source, available on github, and additional contributions are welcome.

Code site:
https://github.com/wbalmer/backtracks

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