Study of Short Period Variables and Small Amplitude Periodic Variables

TL;DR

This study evaluates Gaia's ability to detect and recover periods of short period and small amplitude variable stars using synthetic light-curves that mimic Gaia's observational characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a new analysis of Gaia's period recovery performance for short period, low amplitude variables, extending previous studies to non-stationary Fourier spectra.

Findings

Gaia can recover periods of short period variables with high accuracy under certain conditions.

Synthetic light-curves with Gaia-like sampling and noise levels effectively model real observations.

The study provides statistical metrics for period recovery success rates.

Abstract

Our goal is to assess Gaia's performance on the period recovery of short period (p < 2 hours) and small amplitude variability. To reach this goal first we collected the properties of variable stars that fit the requirements described above. Then we built a database of synthetic light-curves with short period and low amplitude variability with time sampling that follows the Gaia nominal scanning law and with noise level corresponding to the expected photometric precision of Gaia. Finally we performed period search on the synthetic light-curves to obtain period recovery statistics. This work extends our previous period recovery studies to short period variable stars which have non-stationary Fourier spectra.