The TESS-HERMES survey data release 1: High-resolution spectroscopy of the TESS southern continuous viewing zone

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will provide high-precision time series photometry for millions of stars with at least a half-hour cadence. Of particular interest are the circular regions of 12° radius centred around the ecliptic poles that will be observed continuously for a full year. Spectroscopic stellar parameters are desirable to characterize and select suitable targets for TESS, whether they are focused on exploring exoplanets, stellar astrophysics or Galactic archaeology. Here, we present spectroscopic stellar parameters (Teff, log g, [Fe/H], v sin i, vmicro) for about 16 000 dwarf and subgiant stars in TESS' southern continuous viewing zone. For almost all the stars, we also present Bayesian estimates of stellar properties including distance, extinction, mass, radius and age using theoretical isochrones. Stellar surface gravity and radius are made available for an additional set of roughly 8500 red giants. All our target stars are in the range 10 < V < 13.1. Among them, we identify and list 227 stars belonging to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The data were taken using the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES; R ~ 28 000) at the Anglo-Australian Telescope as part of the TESS-HERMES survey. Comparing our results with the TESS Input Catalogue (TIC) shows that the TIC is generally efficient in separating dwarfs and giants, but it has flagged more than 100 cool dwarfs (Teff < 4800 K) as giants, which ought to be high-priority targets for the exoplanet search. The catalogue can be accessed via http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/tess-hermes/, or atMikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST).SS is funded by University of Sydney Senior Fellowship made possible by the office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research, and partial funding from Bland–Hawthorn’s Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. DS is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (project number FT1400147). SB and KL acknowledge funds from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the framework of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award endowed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. KL acknowledges funds from the Swedish Research Council (Grant nr. 2015-00415_3) and Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (Cofund Project INCA 600398). TZ acknowledges financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. P1-0188). ARC is supported through Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant DP160100637. Parts of the computations were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at UPPMAX under project 2015/1-309 and 2016/1-400. We thank Keivan Stassun and Willie Torres for helpful comments on the manuscript. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC; https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement