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Description
The Vista Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) near-infrared (IR) variability survey explores some of the most complicated regions of the Milky Way bulge and disk in terms of high extinction and high crowding. We add a new wavelength dimension to the optical information available at the American Association of Variable Star Observers International Variable Star Index (VSX-AAVSO) catalogue to test the VVV survey near-IR photometry to better characterise these objects. We cross-match the VVV and the VSX-AAVSO catalogues along with Gaia Data Release 2 photometry and parallax. We present a catalogue that includes accurate individual coordinates, near-IR magnitudes (ZYJHKs), extinctions AKs, and distances based on Gaia parallaxes. We also show the near-IR CMDs and spatial distributions for the different VSX types of variable stars, including important distance indicators, such as RR Lyrae, Cepheids and Miras. By analysing the photometric flags in our catalogue, we found that around 20% of the stars with measured and verified variability are flagged as "non-stellar source", even when they are outside of the saturation and/or noise regimes. Additionally, we pair-matched our sample with the VIVA catalogue and found that more than half of our sources are missing from the VVV variability list, mostly due to low signal-to-noise observations or photometric problems with a small percentage due to failures in the selection process. Conclusions. Our results suggest that the current knowledge about variability in the Galaxy is biased to the nearby, low extincted stars. The present catalogue also provides the groundwork to characterise the results of future large variability surveys like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time in the heavily crowded and reddened regions of the Galactic plane, as wellas follow-up campaigns to characterise specific types of variables. The analysis of the miss-flagged stars can be used to improve the photometric classification of the VVV data allowing to expand the amount of data considered useful for science purposes. Besides, we provide an additional list of stars missed by the VIVA procedures for which the observations are actually good and they were missed due to some failure in the VIVA selection process.
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