The ASAS-SN Catalog of Variable Stars I: The Serendipitous Survey

T. Jayasinghe, C. S. Kochanek, K. Z. Stanek, B. J. Shappee, T. W. -S. Holoien, Todd A. Thompson, J. L. Prieto, Subo Dong, M. Pawlak, J. V. Shields, G. Pojmanski, S. Otero, C. A. Britt, D. Will

Published 2018-03-02Version 1

The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) is the first optical survey to routinely monitor the whole sky with a cadence of $\sim2-3$ days down to V$\lesssim17$ mag. ASAS-SN has monitored the whole sky since 2014, collecting $\sim100-500$ epochs of observations per field. The V-band light curves for candidate variables identified during the search for supernovae are classified using a random forest classifier and visually verified. We present a catalog of 66,533 bright, new variable stars discovered during our search for supernovae, including 27,753 periodic variables and 38,780 irregular variables. V-band light curves for the ASAS-SN variables are available through the ASAS-SN variable stars database (https://asas-sn.osu.edu/variables). The database will begin to include the light curves of known variable stars in the near future along with the results for a systematic, all-sky variability survey.