English

Binary star detectability in $Kepler$ data from phase modulation of different types of oscillations

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2016-05-13 v1

Abstract

Detecting binary stars in photometric time series is traditionally done by measuring eclipses. This requires the orbital plane to be aligned with the observer. A new method without that requirement uses stellar oscillations to measure delays in the light arrival time and has been successfully applied to δ\delta Scuti stars. However, application to other types of stars has not been explored. To investigate this we simulated light curves with a range of input parameters. We find a correlation between the signal-to-noise of the pulsation modes and the time delay required to detect binary motion. The detectability of the binarity in the simulations and in real KeplerKepler data shows strong agreement, hence, we describe the factors that have prevented this method from discovering binary companions to stars belonging to various classes of pulsating stars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.03578,
  title  = {Binary star detectability in $Kepler$ data from phase modulation of different types of oscillations},
  author = {Douglas L. Compton and Timothy R. Bedding and Simon J. Murphy and Dennis Stello},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.03578},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:58:51.525Z