Issue |
EPJ Web Conf.
Volume 152, 2017
Wide-Field Variability Surveys: A 21st Century Perspective – 22nd Los Alamos Stellar Pulsation – Conference Series Meeting
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Article Number | 01007 | |
Number of page(s) | 12 | |
Section | Past and current surveys: What we have learned, where we are standing | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201715201007 | |
Published online | 08 September 2017 |
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201715201007
Time-series surveys and pulsating stars: The near-infrared perspective
Department of Astronomy, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyoku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
* matsunaga@astron.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Published online: 8 September 2017
The purpose of this review is to discuss the advantages and problems of nearinfrared surveys in observing pulsating stars in the Milky Way. One of the advantages of near-infrared surveys, when compared to optical counterparts, is that the interstellar extinction is significantly smaller. As we see in this review, a significant volume of the Galactic disk can be reached by infrared surveys but not by optical ones. Towards highly obscured regions in the Galactic mid-plane, however, the interstellar extinction causes serious problems even with near-infrared data in understanding the observational results. After a review on previous and current near-infrared surveys, we discuss the effects of the interstellar extinction in optical (including Gaia) to near-infrared broad bands based on a simple calculation using synthetic spectral energy distribution. We then review the recent results on classical Cepheids towards the Galactic center and the bulge, as a case study, to see the impact of the uncertainty in the extinction law. The extinction law, i.e. the wavelength dependency of the extinction, is not fully characterized, and its uncertainty makes it hard to make the correction. Its characterization is an urgent task in order to exploit the outcomes of ongoing large-scale surveys of pulsating stars, e.g. for drawing a map of pulsating stars across the Galactic disk.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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