Title: Synergies between Exoplanet Surveys and Variable Star Research,
Abstract: With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back
to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems.
Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the
shallow transit events is only a few percent of the orbital period, the goal
was to monitor continuously as many stars as possible for at least a period of
a few months. Small aperture, large field of view automated telescope systems
have been installed with a parallel development of new data reduction and
analysis methods, leading to better than 1% per data point precision for
thousands of stars. With the successful launch of the photometric satellites
CoRot and Kepler, the precision increased further by one-two orders of
magnitude. Millions of stars have been analyzed and searched for transits. In
the history of variable star astronomy this is the biggest undertaking so far,
resulting in photometric time series inventories immensely valuable for the
whole field. In this review we briefly discuss the methods of data analysis
that were inspired by the main science driver of these surveys and highlight
some of the most interesting variable star results that impact the field of
variable star astronomy.