Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars: on the Origin of Contact Binaries and the Degree of Thermal Contact

Details Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars: on the Origin of Contact Binaries and the Degree of Thermal Contact Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars: on the Origin of Contact Binaries and the Degree of Thermal Contact

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21714010p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #140.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

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Contact binary stars (W UMa-type binaries) are one of most ubiquitous close binaries in our Galaxy. The components evolved into a system that shares a common envelope and features active mass transfer. Because of the components' proximity, orbital periods of these systems are short (2-18 hours) and the orbital velocities are large (100-300 km/s). It might be expected that contact binary envelopes are in thermal contact, yet the observations indicate otherwise. Further, the evolution of these stars is speculated to be due to either tidal/magnetic tightening of the orbit or to 3rd body interaction, yet to date there is no definitive consensus. Kepler holds great promise in resolving these puzzles since the ultra-high precision photometry allows us to model the target stars to unprecedented accuracy. In September 2010 we acquired high-resolution echelle spectra at the 4-m Mayall telescope (Kitt Peak, AZ) of 15 select contact binaries in the Kepler field at 5 phases distributed uniformly across the phase space. These observations provided us with the masses, projected semi-major axes, and center-of-mass radial velocities of program stars, and allowed us, in conjunction with the Kepler data, to completely characterize the absolute properties (masses, radii, temperatures, luminosities) of these prime W UMa-type binaries. Here we present a preliminary analysis of three select systems, KepIDs 8496820, 9392682, and 12305537, based on the public Kepler data and high-resolution spectroscopy. The final analysis of these and other stars will be supplemented with the proprietary Kepler data obtained through the Cycle II Guest Observer program 09-KEPLER09-0054, which we gratefully acknowledge. This work was funded in part by NSF/RUI grant AST-05-07542.

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