A Minute-Cadence Deep Bulge Survey: First Data Release of DREAMS
Abstract
The DECam Rogue Earths and Mars Survey (DREAMS), a NOIRLab survey program, has been conducting a three-year survey covering a 5\,deg area in the Galactic bulge since 2025 June. Its primary science goal is to detect low-mass free-floating planets through microlensing, while its minute-level cadence also enables the detection and characterization of rapid phenomena on timescales of minutes to hours such as stellar flares and pulsating stars. Here, we present the data reduction and calibration of the DREAMS observations obtained in 2025 and introduce the first DREAMS data release (DR1). DR1 includes 1,856 -band observations and 325 -band observations for 59,372,789 stars. The DREAMS DR1 catalog contains at least twice as many stars as any previous catalog covering the same 5\,deg area. We present DREAMS light curves for a known blue large-amplitude pulsator and a known transiting system to demonstrate the survey's capabilities. We also perform a pilot search for short-duration variables over about 0.4% of the DR1 sample, identifying one new short microlensing event, two stellar flares, and 24 new short variables. This suggests that DREAMS DR1 may contain hundreds of stellar flares and thousands of previously unknown short variables.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.27364,
title = {A Minute-Cadence Deep Bulge Survey: First Data Release of DREAMS},
author = {Hongjing Yang and Weicheng Zang and Francisco Valdes and Qiyue Qian and Yuchen Tang and Zhixing Li and Yuxin Shang and Shude Mao and Yaosong Yu and Guillermo Damke and Alfredo Zenteno and Steve Heathcote and Konstantina Boutsia and Andong Xu and Hao Ma and Jiyuan Zhang and Hongyu Li and Xikai Shan and Przemek Mróz and Xiurui Zhao and Andrew Gould and Jennifer C. Yee and Chung-Uk Lee and Matthew Penny and Sean Terry and Patrick Tamburo and Tim Cunningham and Quanzhi Ye and Eric W. Peng and Rachel Street and Katarzyna Kruszyńska and Etienne Bachelet and Yiannis Tsapras and Markus Hundertmark},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.27364},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
18 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. Data release portal: https://astro.westlake.edu.cn/dreams