Photometric Variability in the CSTAR Field: Results From the 2008 Data Set

Songhu Wang, Hui Zhang, Xu Zhou, Ji-Lin Zhou, Jian-Ning Fu, Ming Yang, Huigen Liu, Jiwei Xie, Lifan Wang, Lingzhi Wang, R. A. Wittenmyer, M. C. B. Ashley, Long-Long Feng, Xuefei Gong, J. S. Lawrence, Qiang Liu, D. M. Luong-Van, Jun Ma, Xiyan Peng, J. W. V. Storey, Zhenyu Wu, Jun Yan, Huigen Yang, Ji Yang, Xiangyan Yuan, Tianmeng Zhang, Xiaojia Zhang, Zhenxi Zhu, Hu Zou

Published 2015-05-06Version 1

The Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR) is the first telescope facility built at Dome A, Antarctica. During the 2008 observing season, the installation provided long-baseline and high-cadence photometric observations in the i-band for 18,145 targets within 20 deg2 CSTAR field around the South Celestial Pole for the purpose of monitoring the astronomical observing quality of Dome A and detecting various types of photometric variability. Using sensitive and robust detection methods, we discover 274 potential variables from this data set, 83 of which are new discoveries. We characterize most of them, providing the periods, amplitudes and classes of variability. The catalog of all these variables is presented along with the discussion of their statistical properties.