What can we learn from this?

A majority of the objects that we found were previously documented using other databases, and thus our work serves to confirm that they in fact exist and behave in the way that other people think they do. Some of the objects that we found were expected, but previously undocumented, i.e. many of the objects marked as possible. In this case, we add to the current census of sources. There are also the objects that had no apparent counterpart. More work needs to be done to determine what the origin of these sources is (though from our preliminary investigation we can tentatively say that they are not due to gamma ray bursts). And finally, there are the few objects that have undocumented interesting features (though the source itself may be documented). These discoveries highlight the importance of manually following up with sources that were automatically determined to be variable.

Future Work

The next step is to run our program on other X-ray databases, in particular the XMM Newton catalog. If the data is processed and calibrated in the same format as the Chandra data, then the two catalogs can be combined, filling in the gaps of both databases and allowing variability to be tracked more accurately. Follow up work can be done on the undetermined sources and the sources listed here are interesting.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1359462, a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant awarded to CIERA at Northwestern University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.