Overview

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Explorer (NEOWISE) mission provides a decade of all-sky time-series data at 3.4 and 4.6 um and an unprecedented opportunity for the discovery and characterization of variable objects. VarWISE catalogs infrared-variable objects discovered within the NEOWISE single-exposure data. VarWISE employs unique methodologies, including the spatial clustering of apparitions and the adoption of novel machine learning-based variable detection (VARnet) and classification (XGBoost) to identify and characterize significant variability. The catalog includes a prediction of variable object type and best-fit period values for each object, if its variations are cyclical, along with other calculated parameters to characterize the nature of the variability. The VarWISE Pure Catalog, containing only variables of highest confidence, has 457,080 objects, 49.81% of which are new discoveries; the VarWISE Extended Catalog, containing all sources, has 1,918,082 objects, 82.02% of which are new.

The VarWISE Associations Table provides, for every VarWISE object, a link between the cluster_id value listed in the VarWISE catalogs and the individual detection values from the NEOWISE-R Single Exposure (L1b) Source Table. This Associations Table allows users to identify the same cloud of data points as those used in the VarWISE analyses above, should that information prove valuable.