Mahtab Gholami (Iranian National Observatory Tehran, Iran)

The Isaac Newton Telescope Monitoring Survey of Local Group Dwarf Galaxies. Variable Stars in the Nearest Starburst Dwarf Galaxy, IC 10

Stars are always attractive. They can be eclipsed, pulsated, flared, or even exploded depending on their nature. Over time, these processes lead to the brightness of stars varying and, as a result, observing these variations in brightness enables us to gain a better understanding of stars’ nature, evolution, birth, and death, as well as their physical processes. Variable stars help us to understand some of the most exciting objects in the sky: exoplanets, supernovas, pulsars, quasars, gamma-ray bursts, and even black holes. Here, we studied variable stars in the nearest starburst galaxy of the Local Group, IC 10! To identify variable stars in IC 10, we conducted an optical monitoring survey using the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) with the wide-field camera (WFC) in the i-band and V-band from 2015 to 2017. We created a photometric catalog for 53,579 stars within the area of CCD4 of WFC, of which we classified more than 1000 stars as variable candidates, mostly asymptotic giant branch stars (AGBs) and red supergiants (RSGs), within the CCD4 area. By comparing our output catalog to the other catalogs (e.g., Pan-STARRS, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Hubble Space Telescope (HST)) we determined the success of our detection method. Furthermore, we used red giant branch stars to estimate the galaxy's distance. This study resenting the variable stars survey methodology and the photometric catalog, which will be available to the public through the Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg soon.