The TAOS Project Stellar Variability II. Detection of 15 Variable Stars

Abstract

The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) project has collected more than a billion photometric measurements since 2005 January. These sky survey data-covering timescales from a fraction of a second to a few hundred days-are a useful source to study stellar variability. A total of 167 star fields, mostly along the ecliptic plane, have been selected for photometric monitoring with the TAOS telescopes. This paper presents our initial analysis of a search for periodic variable stars from the time-series TAOS data on one particular TAOS field, No. 151 (RA = 17$^{\rm h}30^{\rm m}6\fs$67, Dec = 27\degr17\arcmin 30\arcsec, J2000), which had been observed over 47 epochs in 2005. A total of 81 candidate variables are identified in the 3 square degree field, with magnitudes in the range 8 < R < 16. On the basis of the periodicity and shape of the lightcurves, 29 variables, 15 of which were previously unknown, are classified as RR Lyrae, Cepheid, delta Scuti, SX Phonencis, semi-regular and eclipsing binaries.

20 pages, 6 figures, accepted in The Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (7)

• Analysis of RR Lyrae Stars in the Northern Sky Variability Survey
• The TAOS Project: Upper Bounds on the Population of Small KBOs and Tests of Models of Formation and Evolution of the Outer Solar System
• The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey: The Multi-Telescope Robotic Observatory
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• The TAOS Project Stellar Variability I. Detection of Low-Amplitude delta Scuti Stars
• The TAOS Project Stellar Variability II. Detection of 15 Variable Stars
• Exploring the Variable Sky with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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