Identifying Candidate Optical Variables Using Gaia Data Release 2

Abstract

Gaia is undertaking a deep synoptic survey of the Galaxy, but photometry from individual epochs has, as of yet, only been released for a minimal number of sources. We show that it is possible to identify variable stars in Gaia Data Release 2 by selecting stars with unexpectedly large photometric uncertainties given their brightness and number of observations. By comparing our results to existing catalogs of variables, we show that information on the amplitude of variability is also implicitly present in the Gaia photometric uncertainties. We present a catalog of about 9.3 million candidate variable stars, and discuss its limitations and prospects for future tests and extensions.

Accepted to ApJ. 9 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables

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• A New Flaring Black Widow Candidate and Demographics of Black Widow Millisecond Pulsars in the Galactic Field
• Stellar variability in Gaia DR3. I. Three-band photometric dispersions for 145 million sources
• Multiwavelength evidence for a new flare-mode transitional millisecond pulsar
• Searching for TESS Photometric Variability of Possible JWST Spectrophotometric Standard Stars