INTEGRAL OMC First Catalog of Optically Variable Sources
Short Name:
INTOMCVS
Date:
07 Mar 2025
Publisher:
NASA/GSFC HEASARC
Description:
The Optical Monitoring Camera (OMC) on board the high-energy INTEGRAL satellite provides photometry in the Johnson V-band within a 5 by 5 degree field of view. The OMC is able to detect optical sources brighter than around V ~ 18, from a previously selected list of potential targets of interest. After more than nine years of observations, the OMC database contains light curves for more than 70 000 sources (with more than 50 photometric points each). The objectives of the present work have been to characterize the potential variability of the objects monitored by OMC, to identify periodic sources and to compute their periods, taking advantage of the stability and long monitoring time of the OMC. The first catalog of variable sources observed by OMC has been developed with observations from October 2002 to February 2010. To detect potential variability, the authors have performed a chi-squared test, finding 5263 variable sources, for 1337 of which the periods have been determined, out of an initial sample of 6071 objects with good photometric quality and more than 300 data points each. They have studied the potential periodicity of these sources using a method based on the phase dispersion minimization technique, optimized to handle light curves with very different shapes. For each object in the catalog, the median of the visual magnitude, the magnitude at maximum and minimum brightness in the light curve during the window of observations and the period, when found, are provided. The types of variable objects in the catalogue include eclipsing binaries, pulsating stars, rotating stars, eruptive stars, extragalactic objects, X-ray binaries, cataclysmic variables, Be stars and other objects with unknown kinds of variability. Links to charts for each object, including the DSS image around the target, the unfolded and folded light curves with the periods that the authors have derived and/or with the cataloged ones are provided in this database. This table was created by the HEASARC in January 2013 based on the <a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/548/A79">CDS Catalog J/A+A/548/A79</a> file omc-var.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
