2025/05/06 by Mahtab Gholami, Gholami, Mahtab, Atefeh Javadi +17
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.03972
openalex publication_date 2025/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
To identify long-period variable (LPV) stars in IC10 - the nearest starburst galaxy of the Local Group (LG) - we conducted an optical monitoring survey using the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) with the wide-field camera (WFC) in the i-band and V-band from 2015 to 2017. We created a photometric catalog for 53,579 stars within the area of CCD4 of WFC (∼ 0.07 deg2 corresponding to 13.5 kpc2 at the distance of IC10), of which we classified 536 and 380 stars as long-period variable candidates (LPVs), mostly asymptotic giant branch stars (AGBs) and red supergiants (RSGs), within CCD4 and two half-light radii of IC10, respectively. By comparing our output catalog to the catalogs from Pan-STARRS, Spitzer Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and carbon stars from the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope (CFHT) survey, we determined the success of our detection method. We recovered ∼ 73% of Spitzer's sources in our catalog and demonstrated that our survey successfully identified 43% of the variable stars found with Spitzer, and also retrieved 40% of the extremely dusty AGB stars among the Spitzer variables. In addition, we successfully identified ∼ 70% of HST variables in our catalog. Furthermore, we found all the confirmed LPVs that Gaia DR3 detected in IC10 among our identified LPVs. This paper is the first in a series on IC10, presenting the variable star survey methodology and the photometric catalog, available to the public through the Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg.