New variable sources revealed by DECam toward the LMC: The first 15 deg2

Abstract

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is a sensitive, wide field instrument mounted at the prime focus of the 4 mV. Blanco Telescope in Chile. Beside its main objectives, i.e. understanding the growth and evolution of structures in the Universe, the camera offers the opportunity to observe a ∼3deg2 field of view in one single pointing and, with an adequate cadence, to identify the variable sources contained. In this paper, we present the result of a DECam observational campaign toward the LMC and give a catalogue of the observed variable sources. We considered all the available DECam observations of the LMC, acquired during 32 nights over a period of two years (from February 2018 to January 2020), and set up a specific pipeline for detecting and characterizing variable sources in the observed fields. Here, we report on the first 15deg2 in and around the LMC as observed by DECam, testing the capabilities of our pipeline. Since many of the observed fields cover a rather crowded region of the sky, we adopted the ISIS subtraction package which, even in these conditions, can detect variables at a very low signal to noise ratio. All the potentially identified variable sources were then analysed and each light curve tested for periodicity by using the Lomb–Scargle and Schwarzenberg-Czerny algorithms. Furthermore, we classified the identified sources by using the UPSILoN neural network. This analysis allowed us to find 70 981 variable stars, 1266 of which were previously unknown. We estimated the period of the variables and compared it with the available values in the catalogues. Moreover, for the 1266 newly detected objects, an attempted classification based on light curve analysis is presented.