English

Two Candidate KH 15D-like Systems from the Zwicky Transient Facility

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2022-07-20 v2 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

KH 15D contains a circumbinary disk that is tilted relative to the orbital plane of the central binary. The precession of the disk and the orbital motion of the binary together produce rich phenomena in the photometric light curve. In this work, we present the discovery and preliminary analysis of two objects that resemble the key features of KH 15D from the Zwicky Transient Facility. These new objects, Bernhard-1 and Bernhard-2, show large-amplitude (>1.5>1.5\,mag), long-duration (more than tens of days), and periodic dimming events. A one-sided screen model is developed to model the photometric behaviour of these objects, the physical interpretation of which is a tilted, warped circumbinary disk occulting the inner binary. Changes in the object light curves suggest potential precession periods over timescales longer than 10 years. Additional photometric and spectroscopic observations are encouraged to better understand the nature of these interesting systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.00813,
  title  = {Two Candidate KH 15D-like Systems from the Zwicky Transient Facility},
  author = {Wei Zhu and Klaus Bernhard and Fei Dai and Min Fang and J. J. Zanazzi and Weicheng Zang and Subo Dong and Franz-Josef Hambsch and Tianjun Gan and Zexuan Wu and Michael Poon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.00813},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, accepted to ApJ Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:36:39.835Z