Mass Ratio and Spot Parameter Estimation from Eclipsing Binary Star Light Curves

Eclipsing binary stars have a rich history of contributing to the field of stellar astrophysics. Most of the available information on the fundamental properties of stars has come from the analysis of observations of binaries. The availability of powerful computers and sophisticated codes that apply physical models has resulted in determinations of masses and radii of sufficient accuracy to provide critical tests of theories of stellar structure and evolution. Despite their sophistication, these codes still require the guiding hand of trained scientists to extract reliable information. The computer code will produce results, but it is still imperative for the analyst to ensure that those results make astrophysical sense, and to ascertain their reliability. Care must be taken to ensure that we are asking the codes for parameters for which there is information in the data. The analysis of synthetic observations with simulated observational errors of typical size can provide valuable insight to the analysis process because the parameters used to generate the observations are known. Such observations are herein analyzed to guide the process of determining mass ratios and spot parameters from eclipsing binary light curves. The goal of this paper is to illustrate some of the subtleties that need to be recognized and treated properly when analyzing binary star data.

TESS Eclipsing Binary Stars. I. Short-cadence Observations of 4584 Eclipsing Binaries in Sectors 1–26

In this paper we present a catalog of 4584 eclipsing binaries observed during the first two years (26 sectors) of the TESS survey. We discuss selection criteria for eclipsing binary candidates, detection of hitherto unknown eclipsing systems, determination of the ephemerides, the validation and triage process, and the derivation of heuristic estimates for the ephemerides. Instead of keeping to the widely used discrete classes, we propose a binary star morphology classification based on a dimensionality reduction algorithm. Finally, we present statistical properties of the sample, we qualitatively estimate completeness, and we discuss the results. The work presented here is organized and performed within the TESS Eclipsing Binary Working Group, an open group of professional and citizen scientists; we conclude by describing ongoing work and future goals for the group. The catalog is available from http://tessEBs.villanova.edu and from MAST.

Automatic Search of Cataclysmic Variables Based on LightGBM in LAMOST-DR7

The search for special and rare celestial objects has always played an important role in astronomy. Cataclysmic Variables (CVs) are special and rare binary systems with accretion disks. Most CVs are in the quiescent period, and their spectra have the emission lines of Balmer series, HeI, and HeII. A few CVs in the outburst period have the absorption lines of Balmer series. Owing to the scarcity of numbers, expanding the spectral data of CVs is of positive significance for studying the formation of accretion disks and the evolution of binary star system models. At present, the research for astronomical spectra has entered the era of Big Data. The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopy Telescope (LAMOST) has produced more than tens of millions of spectral data. the latest released LAMOST-DR7 includes 10.6 million low-resolution spectral data in 4926 sky regions, providing ideal data support for searching CV candidates. To process and analyze the massive amounts of spectral data, this study employed the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) algorithm, which is based on the ensemble tree model to automatically conduct the search in LAMOST-DR7. Finally, 225 CV candidates were found and four new CV candidates were verified by SIMBAD and published catalogs. This study also built the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models and used Accuracy, Precision, Recall, the F1-score, and the ROC curve to compare the four models comprehensively. Experimental results showed that LightGBM is more efficient. The search for CVs based on LightGBM not only enriches the existing CV spectral library, but also provides a reference for the data mining of other rare celestial objects in massive spectral data.

Gravitational waves

The theory of weak gravitational waves is discussed at length. The transverse traceless gauge is described, and the behaviour of plane wave solutions obtained. The impact of a wave on physical objects, and hence methods for their detection, are calculated. The laser interferometric gravitational wave detector is described. Sources such as binary stars are considered. The compact source approximation is employed, and the quadrupole formula relating the wave amplitude to the quadrupole of the source is obtained. Energy flux in gravitational waves is calculated by two methods, one more general, the other giving further physical insight. The total emitted power is obtained. These are lengthy calculations but they are presented in full. Finally they are applied in detail to a binary star with elliptical orbtis (the Hulse Taylor binary) and to a black hole merger detected by the LIGO interferometers.

Absolute parameters of young stars: PU Pup

We present combined photometric and spectroscopic analyses of the southern binary star PU Pup. High-resolution spectra of this system were taken at the University of Canterbury Mt. John Observatory in the years 2008 and again in 2014–2015. We find the light contribution of the secondary component to be only ∼2% of the total light of the system in optical wavelengths, resulting in a single-lined spectroscopic binary. Recent TESS data revealed grazing eclipses within the light minima, though the tidal distortion, examined also from Hipparcos data, remains the predominating light curve effect. Our model shows PU Pup to have the more massive primary relatively close to filling its Roche lobe. PU Pup is thus approaching the rare ‘fast phase’ of interactive (Case B) evolution. Our adopted absolute parameters are as follows: M 1 = 4.10 (±0.20) M ⊙, M 2 = 0.65 (±0.05) M ⊙, R 1 = 6.60 (±0.30) R ⊙, R 2 = 0.90 (±0.10) R ⊙; T 1 = 11500 (±500) K, T 2 = 5000 (±350) K; photometric distance = 186 (±20) pc, age = 170 (±20) Myr. The less-massive secondary component is found to be significantly oversized and overluminous compared to standard main sequence models. We discuss this discrepancy referring to heating from the reflection effect.