The Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV)

Abstract

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has obtained multi-epoch observations providing the opportunity for a comprehensive variability search aiming to uncover new variables. We have therefore undertaken the task of creating a catalog of variable sources based on version 3 of the Hubble Source Catalog (HSC), which relies on publicly available images obtained with the WFPC2, ACS, and WFC3 instruments onboard the HST. We adopted magnitude-dependent thresholding in median absolute deviation (a robust measure of light curve scatter) combined with sophisticated preprocessing techniques and visual quality control to identify and validate variable sources observed by Hubble with the same instrument and filter combination five or more times. The Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV) includes 84,428 candidate variable sources (out of 3.7 million HSC sources that were searched for variability) with $V\le 27$ mag; for 11,115 of them the variability is detected in more than one filter. The data points in the light curves of the variables in the HCV catalog range from five to 120 points (typically having less than ten points); the time baseline ranges from under a day to over 15 years; while $\sim$8% of all variables have amplitudes in excess of 1 mag. Visual inspection performed on a subset of the candidate variables suggests that at least 80% of the candidate variables that passed our automated quality control are true variable sources rather than spurious detections resulting from blending, residual cosmic rays, and calibration errors. The HCV is the first, homogeneous catalog of variable sources created from archival HST data and currently is the deepest catalog of variables available. The catalog includes variable stars in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies, as well as transients and variable active galactic nuclei. (abbreviated)

arXiv comment33 pages, 15 figures, 11 tables; accepted in A&A. The HCV is available from the ESA Hubble Science Archive (eHST) (http://archives.esac.esa.int/ehst) at ESAC, and can be easily explored using the HCV Explorer (http://archives.esac.esa.int/hcv-explorer). The HCV is also hosted at STScI in the form of a High Level Science Product (HLSP) in MAST (https://archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/hcv)

References in corpus (103)

• Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
• The Gaia mission
• LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
• Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant
• The SIMBAD astronomical database
• CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey - The Hubble Space Telescope Observations, Imaging Data Products and Mosaics
• The Man Behind the Curtain: X-rays Drive the UV through NIR Variability in the 2013 AGN Outburst in NGC 2617
• A method for optimal image subtraction
• First Results from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey
• The WASP Project and the SuperWASP Cameras
• Kepler Mission Design, Realized Photometric Performance, and Early Science
• The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0
• The Dark Energy Survey: more than dark energy - an overview
• VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV): The public ESO near-IR variability survey of the Milky Way
• Limits on the Macho Content of the Galactic Halo from the EROS-2 Survey of the Magellanic Clouds
• SALT2: using distant supernovae to improve the use of Type Ia supernovae as distance indicators
• The CoRoT satellite in flight : description and performance
• An eclipsing binary distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud accurate to 2 per cent
• A distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to one per cent
• The Chandra Source Catalog
• Wide-field millimagnitude photometry with HAT: A Tool for Extra-solar Planet Detection
• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite: Simulations of planet detections and astrophysical false positives
• Correcting systematic effects in a large set of photometric lightcurves
• Real-Time Difference Imaging Analysis of MOA Galactic Bulge Observations During 2000
• The Catalina Surveys Periodic Variable Star Catalog
• The ASAS-SN Catalog of Variable Stars I: The Serendipitous Survey
• Bayesian Blocks, A New Method to Analyze Structure in Photon Counting Data
• A First Catalog of Variable Stars Measured by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS)
• The XMM-Newton serendipitous survey. VII. The third XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue
• The VMC Survey - I. Strategy and First Data
• Cosmological Constraints from Measurements of Type Ia Supernovae discovered during the first 1.5 years of the Pan-STARRS1 Survey
• A Trend Filtering Algorithm for wide field variability surveys
• The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS)
• Type Ia Supernova Distances at z > 1.5 from the Hubble Space Telescope Multi-Cycle Treasury Programs: The Early Expansion Rate
• Proper image subtraction - optimal transient detection, photometry and hypothesis testing
• 1SXPS: A deep Swift X-ray Telescope point source catalog with light curves and spectra
• Light and Motion in SDSS Stripe 82: The Catalogues
• The XMM-Newton serendipitous ultraviolet source survey catalogue
• Testing tests on AGN microvariability
• Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) Catalog of Periodic Variable Stars
• High Redshift Supernovae in the Hubble Deep Field
• Comparative performance of selected variability detection techniques in photometric time series
• Variability Properties of 4 Million Sources in the $TESS$ Input Catalog Observed with the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope Survey
• A comparison of period finding algorithms
• Version 1 of the Hubble Source Catalog
• The EPOCH Project: I. Periodic variable stars in the EROS-2 LMC database
• The Variable Stars and Blue Horizontal Branch of the Metal-Rich Globular Cluster NGC 6441
• RR Lyrae Stars in the Andromeda Halo from Deep Imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys
• A Near-Infrared Period-Luminosity Relation for Miras in NGC 4258, an Anchor for a New Distance Ladder
• The seven year Swift-XRT point source catalog (1SWXRT)
• The Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA: Finding transiting exoplanets around bright ($m_V<8$) stars
• Optical and infrared observations of the supernova SN 1999el
• The ACS LCID Project. II. Faint Variable Stars in the Isolated Dwarf Irregular Galaxy IC1613
• The Extragalactic Distance Scale Key Project XVIII. The Discovery of Cepheids and a New Distance to NGC 4535 Using the Hubble Space Telescope
• Machine learning search for variable stars
• Extending Supernova Spectral Templates for Next-Generation Space Telescope Observations
• A new extensive catalog of optically variable AGN in the GOODS Fields and a new statistical approach to variability selection
• Periodic and Aperoidic Variability in the Molecular Cloud ρOphiuchus
• Optical Identification of Cepheids in 19 Host Galaxies of Type Ia Supernovae and NGC 4258 with the Hubble Space Telescope
• Variability-selected Active Galactic Nuclei in the VST-SUDARE/VOICE Survey of the COSMOS Field
• Detecting Variability in Massive Astronomical Time-Series Data I: application of an infinite Gaussian mixture model
• Astronomical Distance Determination in the Space Age. Secondary distance indicators
• De-Trending Time Series for Astronomical Variability Surveys
• Toward an internally consistent astronomical distance scale
• Variability and Multiwavelength Detected AGN in the GOODS Fields
• The VVV Templates Project. Towards an Automated Classification of VVV Light-Curves. I. Building a database of stellar variability in the near-infrared
• Clustering Based Feature Learning on Variable Stars
• HST/ACS Observations of RR Lyrae Stars in Six Ultra-deep Fields of M31
• Variable stars in the globular cluster NGC 7492. New discoveries and physical parameters determination
• First Data Release of the All-sky NOAO Source Catalog
• The HST Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale. XXII. The Discovery of Cepheids in NGC 1326-A
• A Hubble Space Telescope Survey for Novae in M87. I. Light and Color Curves, Spatial Distributions and the Nova Rate
• How well can Charge Transfer Inefficiency be corrected? A parameter sensitivity study for iterative correction
• Robust Identification of Active Galactic Nuclei through HST Optical Variability in GOODS-S: Comparison with the X-ray and mid-IR Selected Samples
• The SkyMapper Transient Survey
• The SEDs, Host Galaxies and Environments of Variability Selected AGN in GOODS-S
• M4 Core Project with HST - III. Search for variable stars in the primary field
• New Insights into Time Series Analysis II -- No Correlated Observations
• New Insights into Time Series Analysis - I - Correlated observations
• Precision multi-band photometry with a DSLR camera
• Searching transients in large-scale surveys. A method based on the Abbe value
• Improved Variable Star Search in Large Photometric Data Sets -- New Variables in CoRoT Field LRa02 Detected by BEST II
• Image Subtraction Reduction of Open Clusters M35 & NGC 2158 In The K2 Campaign-0 Super-Stamp
• Color and Variability Characteristics of Point Sources in the Faint Sky Variability Survey
• Catalog Matching with Astrometric Correction and its Application to the Hubble Legacy Archive
• Stellar variability at the main-sequence turnoff of the intermediate-age LMC cluster NGC 1846
• Difference image analysis: Automatic kernel design using information criteria
• Re-analysis of VLT Data for M83 with Image Subtraction -- Nine-fold Increase in Number of Cepheids
• Detecting Variability in Massive Astronomical Time-Series Data II: Variable Candidates in the Northern Sky Variability Survey
• Optical Photometric Variable Stars towards the Galactic \hii region NGC 2282
• The M4 Core Project with HST -- V. Characterizing the PSFs of WFC3/UVIS by Focus
• Young and Intermediate-age Distance Indicators
• The Berlin Exoplanet Search Telescope II Catalog of Variable Stars. II. Characterization of the CoRoT SRc02 field
• The massive star population of the Virgo Cluster galaxy NGC 4535
• Variability search in M 31 using Principal Component Analysis and the Hubble Source Catalog
• The HST Key Project galaxies NGC 1326A, NGC 1425 and NGC 4548: New variable stars and massive star population
• Monitoring of the Central Region of the Globular Cluster M15 = NGC 7078: New Variable Stars
• Application of the Trend Filtering Algorithm for Photometric Time Series Data
• The Hubble Catalog of Variables
• A new search for variability-selected active galaxies within the VST SUDARE-VOICE survey: the Chandra Deep Field South and the SERVS-SWIRE area
• The Hubble Catalog of Variables

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Final Spitzer IRAC Observations of the Rise and Fall of SN 1987A
• Binary properties of the globular cluster 47 Tuc (NGC 104). A dearth of short-period binaries
• A Multi-wavelength search for Black Widows and Redbacks counterparts of candidate $\gamma$-ray millisecond pulsars
• X-ray Unveiling Events in a z~1.6 Active Galactic Nucleus in the 7 Ms Chandra Deep Field-South
• The Local Galactic Transient Survey Applied to an Optical Search for Directed Intelligence