The Automated Detection and Classification of Variable Stars

Variable stars have been an incredibly important discovery since the early days of astronomy. Certain types of variable stars, such as Cepheids, can give not only great insight into the inner dynamics of stars, but also essential parameters of the star, such as luminosity, mass, and the distance from the observer. The number of discovered variable stars has risen dramatically over time, and several catalogues of variable stars (such as The International Variable Star Index, VSX [1]) have appeared. These catalogues provide a very useful tool for researchers to gather data on statistically large samples of variable stars, which can lead to more insights, such as the distributions of specific types of variable stars. In fact, stars such as Cepheids, whose distance can be readily inferred from their brightness, are being used to obtain distances to star clusters and galaxies, which helps to map the spatial scale of the universe. This project aims at writing a series of programs which will automatically detect and classify every variable star visible by the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) [2], and prepare the correct information required to catalogue the these stars in VSX.