Colloquium
Mining
Photometric Databases for Variable Stars
J. Scott Shaw
Josiah Meigs Professor of Astronomy
Department of Physics
& Astronomy
University of Georgia
Thursday, April 10, 2008, 1:40 p.m., SCIC 126
The
advent of surveys which monitor a large fraction of the entire sky on a
more or less continual basis has resulted in huge databases with light
curves of tens of millions of stars.
Simple search programs can discover tens of thousands of new
variable stars. This information can
be used to better understand the statistics of commonly known variable
stars and to facilitate the discovery of rare types of variable stars. As examples of the latter I will discuss
low mass eclipsing binary systems, sub-dwarf B star (sdB)
eclipsing binaries, and cool Algols.
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