2009/10/13 by Shinjirou Kouzuma, Hitoshi Yamaoka
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Educational Leadership and Practices #Flare star #Sky #Star count #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Variable (mathematics) #Variable star #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-6256/138/5/1508
published as Astron.J.138:1508-1519,2009 · Published in AJ, 34 pages, 12 figures
openalex publication_date 2009/10/13 · arxiv created 2009/10/19 · arxiv updated 2014/11/20 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a catalog of variable stars in the near-infrared wavelength detected with overlapping regions of the Two Micron All Sky Survey public images, and discuss their properties. The investigated region is in the direction of the Galactic center (−30° ≲ l ≲ 20°, | b | ≲ 20°), which covers the entire bulge. We have detected 136 variable stars, of which six are already known and 118 are distributed in the | b | ⩽ 5° region. Additionally, 84 variable stars have optical counterparts in Digitized Sky Survey images. The three diagrams (color–magnitude, light variance, and color–color diagrams) indicate that most of the detected variable stars should be large-amplitude and long-period variables such as Mira variables or OH/IR stars. The number density distribution of the detected variable stars implies that they trace the bar structure of the Galactic bulge.