Periodic Variable Stars Across the Southern Sky
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Date
2015
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Abstract
We continue our search for periodic variables within the ~30,000 square degrees of the sky covered by the Catalina Surveys. Here we analyze six years of optical photometry taken by the Siding Spring Survey (SSS), which is sensitive to sources in the range 11 < V < 19. In all, this new analysis covers ten thousand square degrees on the sky at declinations between -20 and -75 degrees. Due to the very large number of periodic variable candidates found, we perform automated classification of the stars using multivariate kernel density estimation based on features selected from previously classified northern data. We test the accuracy of the results by visually validating a large sample of the objects. We also compare the classifications with those from other automated methods. The final SSS catalog contains tens of thousands of new periodic variable stars including eclipsing binaries, RR Lyrae, LPVs, delta Scuti's and Cepheids. By combining the newly discovered LPVs and RR Lyrae with our previous discoveries, we trace the path of the Sagittarius tidal streams system across the entire sky....