Monitoring All Sky for Variability
arXiv:astro-ph/0005284 · doi:10.1086/316623
Abstract
A few percent of all stars are variable, yet over 90% of variables brighter than 12 magnitude have not been discovered yet. There is a need for an all sky search and for the early detection of any unexpected events: optical flashes from gamma-ray bursts, novae, dwarf novae, supernovae, `killer asteroids'. The ongoing projects like ROTSE, ASAS, TASS, and others, using instruments with just 4 inch aperture, have already discovered thousands of new variable stars, a flash from an explosion at a cosmological distance, and the first partial eclipse of a nearby star by its Jupiter like planet. About one million variables may be discovered with such small instruments, and many more with larger telescopes. The critical elements are software and full automation of the hardware. A complete census of the brightest eclipsing binaries is needed to select objects for a robust empirical calibration of the the accurate distance determination to the Magellanic Clouds, the first step towards the Hubble constant. An archive to be generated by a large number of small instruments will be very valuable for data mining projects. The real time alerts will provide great targets of opportunity for the follow-up observations with the largest telescopes.
6 pages, latex, minor changes, published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific as one of Millennium Essays: 2000, PASP, 112, 1281-1283
References in corpus (4)
Cited by in corpus (33)
- First Results from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey
- The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0
- Northern Sky Variability Survey (NSVS): Public data release
- The ASAS-SN Catalog of Variable Stars I: The Serendipitous Survey
- Substructure revealed by RR Lyraes in SDSS Stripe 82
- System description and first light-curves of HAT, an autonomous observatory for variability search
- Light and Motion in SDSS Stripe 82: The Catalogues
- TASS Mark IV Photometric Survey of the Northern Sky
- Failed gamma-ray bursts and orphan afterglows
- The Discovery and Nature of Optical Transient CSS100217:102913+404220
- The astrophysics of visible-light orbital phase curves in the space age
- The 7.5 Magnitude Limit Sample of Bright Short-Period Binary Stars. I. How Many Contact Binaries Are There?
- Photometric Solutions for Semi-Detached Eclipsing Binaries: Selection of Distance Indicators in the Small Magellanic Cloud
- Tomography of Massive Stars from Core Collapse to Supernova Shock Breakout
- The RAPTOR Experiment: A System for Monitoring the Optical Sky in Real Time
- Automated classification of variable stars for ASAS 1-2 data
- Variable Faint Optical Sources Discovered by Comparing POSS and SDSS Catalogs
- Detecting Variability in Massive Astronomical Time-Series Data I: application of an infinite Gaussian mixture model
- Sky Surveys
- HD 145263: Spectral Observations of Silica Debris Disk Formation via Extreme Space Weathering?
- Some Pattern Recognition Challenges in Data-Intensive Astronomy
- Rotationally modulated variability and pulsations of the He-rich star CPD -62 2124 with an extraordinarily strong magnetic field
- Possible origin of AT2021any: a failed GRB from a structured jet
- Detecting Variability in Massive Astronomical Time-Series Data II: Variable Candidates in the Northern Sky Variability Survey
- Scientific Data Mining in Astronomy
- Flashes in a Star Stream: Automated Classification of Astronomical Transient Events
- Astronomy with Small Telescopes
- The XO Planetary Survey Project - Astrophysical False Positives
- A review of pulsating stars from the ASAS data
- Large Surveys in Cosmology: The Changing Sociology
- Exploring the Time Domain With Synoptic Sky Surveys
- The Transient Optical Sky Survey Data Pipeline
- Monitoring Variability of the Sky