Measuring amplitudes of harmonics and combination frequencies in variable stars
Abstract
Discoveries of RR Lyrae and Cepheid variable stars with multiple modes of pulsation have increased tremendously in recent years. The Fourier spectra of these stars can be quite complicated due to the large number of combination frequencies that can exist between their modes. As a result, light-curve fits to these stars often suffer from undesirable ringing effects that arise from noisy observations and poor phase coverage. These non-physical overfitting artifacts also occur when fitting the harmonics of single-mode stars as well. Here we present a new method for fitting light curves that is much more robust against these effects. We prove that the amplitude measurement problem is very difficult (NP-hard) and provide a heuristic algorithm for solving it quickly and accurately.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1512.00004,
title = {Measuring amplitudes of harmonics and combination frequencies in variable stars},
author = {Earl P. Bellinger and Daniel Wysocki and Shashi M. Kanbur},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.00004},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, RR Lyrae 2015, to appear in the No. 105 issue of the Communications from the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences