Properties of Large-Amplitude Variable Stars Detected With Two Micron All Sky Survey Public Images

Abstract

We present a catalogue of variable stars in the near-infrared wavelength detected with overlapping regions of the 2MASS public images, and discuss their properties. The investigated region is in the direction of the Galactic center (-30 < l < 20, |b| < 20), which covers the entire bulge. We have detected 136 variable stars, of which 6 are already-known and 118 are distributed in |b| < 5 region. Additionally, 84 variable stars have optical counterparts in DSS images. The three diagrams (colour-magnitude, light variance and colour-colour diagrams) indicate that most of the detected variable stars should be largeamplitude and long-period variables such as Mira variables or OH/IR stars. The number density distribution of the detected variable stars implies that they trace the bar structure of the Galactic bulge.

Published in AJ, 34 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (1)

• An infrared study of galactic OH/IR stars. I. An optical/near-IR atlas of the Arecibo sample

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Insights on the Milky Way bulge formation from the correlations between kinematics and metallicity
• VISTA variables in the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy: pulsation- vs. dust-driven winds on the giant branches
• Detecting Variability in Massive Astronomical Time-Series Data II: Variable Candidates in the Northern Sky Variability Survey