Mapping of Milky Way Cepheid Variables

Cepheid Variables are young stars that physically pulsate causing a variation in their luminosity over time. An intrinsic relation exists between the period of these pulsations and the luminosity of these stars. They have therefore become vital distance indicators.

Their young age implies they should mostly be found within the galactic disk. Any outliers would be of interest to merging history of the Milky Way: dwarf satellite galaxies interacting and colliding with our galaxy. Such events could throw the young Cepheids out of the disk to higher latitudes.

The current Gaia DR1 data and the future DR2 release do no contain any time domain information of the cepheids contained within. Therefore, other selection criteria is needed to identify these stars in the data. This causes issues of contamination from other stellar types. Work in this project seeks to formulate optimal selection criteria to map the Cepheids and then devise theoretical models to explain how the observed distribution could have formed. Such work could be combined with the previous mappings of RR Lyrae variables to identify substructure within our Galaxy.