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Author:
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Minniti, D.; Lucas, P. W.; Emerson, J. P.; Saito, R. K.; Hempel, M.; Pietrukowicz, P.; Ahumada, A. V.; Alonso, M. V.; Alonso-García, J.; Arias, José I.; Bandyopadhyay, R. M.; Barbá, R. H.; Barbuy, B.; Bedin, Luigi R.; Bica, E.; Borissova, J.; Bronfman Aguiló, Leonardo; Carraro, Giovanni; Catelan, M.; Clariá, J. J.; Cross, N.; Grijs, R. de; Dékány, I.; Drew, J. E.; Fariña, C.; Feinstein, C.; Fernández Lajús, E.; Gamen, R. C.; Geisle, D.; Gieren, W.; Goldman, B.; Gonzalez, O. A.; Gunthardt, G.; Gurovich, S.; Hambly, N. C.; Irwin, M. J.; Ivanov, V. D.; Jordán, A.; Kerins, E.; Kinemuchi, K.; Kurtev, R.; López-Corredoira, M.; Maccarone, T.; Masetti, N.; Merlo, D.; Messineo, M.; Mirabel, I. F.; Monaco, L.; Morelli, L.; Padilla, N.; Palma, T.; Parisi, M. C.; Pignata, Giuliano; Rejkuba, M.; Roman-Lopes, A.; Sale, S. E.; Schreiber, M. R.; Schröder, A. C.; Smith, M.; Sodré Jr., L.; Soto, M.; Tamura, M.; Tappert, C.; Thompson, M. A.; Toledo, I.; Zoccali, M.
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Abstract:
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We describe the public ESO near-IR variability survey (VVV) scanning
the Milky Way bulge and an adjacent section of the mid-plane where star
formation activity is high. The survey will take 1929 hours of observations
with the 4-metre VISTA telescope during five years (2010 − 2014), covering
109 point sources across an area of 520 deg2, including 33 known globular
clusters and 350 open clusters. The final product will be a deep near-IR atlas
in five passbands (0.9−2.5 μm) and a catalogue of more than 106 variable
point sources. Unlike single-epoch surveys that, in most cases, only produce
2-Dmaps, the VVV variable star survey will enable the construction of a 3-D
map of the surveyed region using well-understood distance indicators such as RR Lyrae stars, and Cepheids. It will yield important information on the
ages of the populations. The observations will be combined with data from
MACHO, OGLE, EROS, VST, Spitzer, HST, Chandra, INTEGRAL, WISE,
Fermi LAT, XMM-Newton, GAIA and ALMA for a complete understanding
of the variable sources in the inner Milky Way. This public survey will provide
data available to the whole community and therefore will enable further
studies of the history of the Milky Way, its globular cluster evolution, and
the population census of the Galactic Bulge and center, as well as the investigations
of the star forming regions in the disk. The combined variable star
catalogues will have important implications for theoretical investigations of
pulsation properties of stars. |