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gaia data release 3 documentation

10.11 RR Lyrae stars

10.11.5 Quality assessment and validation

Quality assessment and validation of the results are performed by crossmatching with a custom compilation of known RR Lyrae stars from different surveys (OGLE-IV, Catalina, PanSTARRS, KEPLER, ASAS, ASAS-SN, ZTF, Gaia DR2, VVV, LINEAR) and variable stars in globular clusters and dwarf spheroidal galaxies. This custom catalogue contains 414 082 unique sources for which we have collected periods and pulsation modes published in literature.

Verification

Verification is done by crossmatching our results with the custom catalogue of known RR Lyrae stars and comparing source attributes computed by the SOS Cep&RRL pipeline with those published in the literature.

Validation

Based on the comparison between the properties of the RR Lyrae stars derived by the SOS Cep&RRL pipeline and those of known objects in the literature, we made a selection of the candidates that led to the final published catalogue. A rough estimate of completeness and contamination of the final RR Lyrae catalogue was obtained by comparison with the OGLE IV collection of RR Lyrae stars in the Magellanic Clouds (Soszyński et al. 2016b) and Galactic bulge (Soszyński et al. 2019). Using a crossmatch radius of 2.5′′, the expected completeness of the Gaia DR3 RR Lyrae samples in these regions of the sky is about 87 % in the LMC, 94 % in the SMC and 73 % in the bulge. The main source of contamination for RR Lyrae stars arises from binaries. To increase purity, we cleaned our RR Lyrae sample from OGLE binaries in the Clouds (Pawlak et al. 2016) and bulge (Soszyński et al. 2016a). Residual contamination from other types of variables, in particular Anomalous and Classical Cepheids, is <1.8 % in the LMC and <6 % in the SMC (for the Galactic bulge, see Clementini et al. 2023). For more details, see Clementini et al. (2023).