THE TAIWANESE–AMERICAN OCCULTATION SURVEY PROJECT STELLAR VARIABILITY. II. DETECTION OF 15 VARIABLE STARS

摘要

The Taiwanese–American Occultation Survey (TAOS) project has collected more than a billion photometricmeasurements since 2005 January. These sky survey data—covering timescales from a fraction of a second toa few hundred days—are a useful source to study stellar variability. A total of 167 star fields, mostly along theecliptic plane, have been selected for photometric monitoring with the TAOS telescopes. This paper presents ourinitial analysis of a search for periodic variable stars from the time-series TAOS data on one particular TAOS field,No. 151 (R.A. = 17h30m6.s7, decl. = 27-17 30, J2000), which had been observed over 47 epochs in 2005. Atotal of 81 candidate variables are identified in the 3 deg2 field, with magnitudes in the range 8 < R < 16.On the basis of the periodicity and shape of the light curves, 29 variables, 15 of which were previouslyunknown, are classified as RR Lyrae, Cepheid, δ Scuti, SX Phonencis, semi-regular, and eclipsing binaries.