High-speed photometry of 16 candidate white dwarfs revealed three new pulsating white dwarfs (one ELM, one low-mass, one ZZ Ceti) and three new binary systems with ellipsoidal or reflection variability.
Constraining Low-Mass White Dwarf Binaries from Ellipsoidal Variations
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
1
Pith paper citing it
abstract
Stars are stretched by tidal interactions in tight binaries, and changes to their projected areas introduce photometric variations twice per orbit. Hermes et al. (2014, ApJ, 792, 39) utilized measurements of these ellipsoidal variations to constrain the radii of low-mass white dwarfs in eight single-lined spectroscopic binaries. We refine this method here, using Monte Carlo simulations to improve constraints on many orbital and stellar properties of binary systems that exhibit ellipsoidal variations. We analyze the recently discovered tidally distorted white dwarf binary system SDSS J1054-2121 in detail, and also revisit the Hermes et al. (2014) sample. Disagreements in some cases between the observations, ellipsoidal variation model, and Gaia radius constraints suggest that extrinsic errors are present, likely in the surface gravities determined through model atmosphere fits to stellar spectra.
fields
astro-ph.SR 1years
2025 1verdicts
CONDITIONAL 1representative citing papers
citing papers explorer
-
Searching for new variable white dwarfs: The discovery of the three new pulsating and three new binary systems
High-speed photometry of 16 candidate white dwarfs revealed three new pulsating white dwarfs (one ELM, one low-mass, one ZZ Ceti) and three new binary systems with ellipsoidal or reflection variability.