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.
A third product, 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 cntr values from the
NEOWISE-R Single Exposure (L1b) Source Table.
If you use VarWISE catalogs, please cite the journal article Paz et al. (2026), as well as the dataset Digital Object
Identifiers (DOI):
10.26131/IRSA656,
10.26131/IRSA657,
and 10.26131/IRSA658.
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VarWISE Overview
IRSA Catalog Search Tool: VarWISE