Photometry of Variable Stars from Dome A, Antarctica
Abstract
Dome A on the Antarctic plateau is likely one of the best observing sites on Earth thanks to the excellent atmospheric conditions present at the site during the long polar winter night. We present high-cadence time-series aperture photometry of 10,000 stars with i<14.5 mag located in a 23 square-degree region centered on the south celestial pole. The photometry was obtained with one of the CSTAR telescopes during 128 days of the 2008 Antarctic winter. We used this photometric data set to derive site statistics for Dome A and to search for variable stars. Thanks to the nearly-uninterrupted synoptic coverage, we find 6 times as many variables as previous surveys with similar magnitude limits. We detected 157 variable stars, of which 55% are unclassified, 27% are likely binaries and 17% are likely pulsating stars. The latter category includes delta Scuti, gamma Doradus and RR Lyrae variables. One variable may be a transiting exoplanet.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1108.0509,
title = {Photometry of Variable Stars from Dome A, Antarctica},
author = {Lingzhi Wang and Lucas M. Macri and Kevin Krisciunas and Lifan Wang and Michael C. B. Ashley and Xiangqun Cui and Long-Long Feng and Xuefei Gong and Jon S. Lawrence and Qiang Liu and Daniel Luong-Van and Carl R. Pennypacker and Zhaohui Shang and John W. V. Storey and Huigen Yang and Ji Yang and Xiangyan Yuan and Donald G. York and Xu Zhou and Zhenxi Zhu and Zonghong Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.0509},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. PDF version with high-resolution figures available at http://faculty.physics.tamu.edu/lmacri/papers/wang11.pdf