Exploring the Variable Sky with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Understand

We quantify the variability of faint unresolved optical sources using a catalog based on multiple SDSS imaging observations.

• The catalog covers SDSS Stripe 82, and contains 58 million photometric observations in the SDSS ugriz system for 1.4 million unresolved sources.
• In each photometric bandpass we compute various low-order lightcurve statistics and use them to select and study variable sources.
• We find that 2% of unresolved optical sources brighter than g=20.5 appear variable at the 0.05 mag level (rms) simultaneously in the g and r bands.