7.3 All-sky classification

Author(s): Lorenzo Rimoldini

The all-sky classification results are published in the Gaia DR2 table vari_classifier_result and include candidates for almost two hundred thousand RR Lyrae stars, about one hundred fifty thousand long period variables, more than eight thousand Cepheids and a similar number of SX Phoenicis/δ Scuti stars. A subset of these candidates was further processed by subsequent modules of the CU7 pipeline (Section 7.2.3), such as the ones of Cepheid and RR Lyrae stars (Section 7.4) and of long period variables (Section 7.7). Other candidates were verified and validated by means of comparisons with the literature and included known misclassifications, which were nevertheless not removed in order to minimise sample selection effects and maintain the distributions of parameters more homogeneous for statistical analyses. The community is expected to take this cautionary note into account when exploiting this data set. Further information on the methods employed and on the classification results is available in Rimoldini et al. (2018).