[vsnet-survey 14] Interesting Paczynski's paper

[Taichi Kato <tkato>]

Interesting Paczynski's paper

    As many of you may have noted, there is an inetersting paper by
Bohdan Paczynski in astro-ph/0005284.  The summary from astro-ph is extracted
below.  Please refer to the original paper available at

    http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0005284

    I personally heartily agree to Paczynski's "open policy", which has been
one of the central policies of VSNET project.

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Title: Monitoring All Sky for Variability
Authors: Bohdan Paczynski

  A few percent of all stars are variable, yet over 90% of variables brighter
than 12 magnitude have not been discovered yet. There is a need for an all sky
search and for the early detection of any unexpected events: optical flashes
from gamma-ray bursts, novae, dwarf novae, supernovae, `killer asteroids'. The
ongoing projects like ROTSE, ASAS, TASS, and others, using instruments with
just 4 inch aperture, have already discovered thousands of new variable stars,
a flash from an explosion at a cosmological distance, and the first partial
eclipse of a nearby star by its Jupiter like planet. About one million
variables may be discovered with such small instruments, and many more with
larger telescopes. The critical elements are software and full automation of
the hardware. A complete census of the brightest eclipsing binaries is needed
to select objects for a robust empirical calibration of the the accurate
distance determination to the Magellanic Clouds, the first step towards the
Hubble constant. An archive to be generated by a large number of small
instruments will be very valuable for data mining projects. The real time
alerts will provide great targets of opportunity for the follow-up observations
with the largest telescopes.

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