Nestled in the mountains of Northern India, is a 4-metre rotating dish of liquid mercury. Over a 10-year period, the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) will survey 117 square degrees of sky, to study the astrometric and photometric variability of all detected objects. One of the scientific programs will be a survey of variable stars. The data gathered will be used to construct a comprehensive catalog of light curves. This will be an essential resource for astronomers studying the formation and evolution of stars, the structure and dynamics of our Milky Way galaxy, and the properties of the Universe as a whole. This catalog will be an aid in our advance to understanding the cosmos and provide deeper insights into the fundamental processes that shape our Universe. In this work, we describe the survey and give some examples of variable stars found in the early commissioning data from the ILMT.
@article{arxiv.2311.05620,
title = {Survey of Variables with the ILMT},
author = {Baldeep Grewal and Bhavya Ailawadhi and Talat Akhunov and Ermanno Borra and Monalisa Dubey and Naveen Dukiya and Jiuyang Fu and Paul Hickson and Kuntal Misra and Brajesh Kumar and Vibhore Negi and Kumar Pranshu and Ethen Sun and Jean Surdej},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.05620},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in the Bulletin of Li\`ege Royal Society of Sciences as a part of 3rd Belgo-Indian Network for Astronomy and Astrophysics (BINA) workshop, 22-24 March 2023