WISE catalog of periodic variable stars

Requiring more than 100 detections for a given object, 50282 carefully and robustly selected periodic variables are discovered, of which 34769 (69%) are new. Most are located in the Galactic plane and near the equatorial poles.

A method to classify variables based on their mid-infrared light curves is established using known variable types in the General Catalog of Variable Stars. Careful classification of the new variables results in a tally of 21427 new EW-type eclipsing binaries, 5654 EA-type eclipsing binaries, 1312 Cepheids, and 1231 RR Lyrae. By comparison with known variables available in the literature, we estimate that the misclassification rate is 5% and 10% for short- and long- period variables, respectively.