Evaluating the Performance of the GAIA Space Mission on and with Eclipsing Binaries: Three Problematic Systems, SV Cam, BS Dra, HP Dra

Details Evaluating the Performance of the GAIA Space Mission on and with Eclipsing Binaries: Three Problematic Systems, SV Cam, BS Dra, HP Dra Evaluating the Performance of the GAIA Space Mission on and with Eclipsing Binaries: Three Problematic Systems, SV Cam, BS Dra, HP Dra

Aug 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005jrasc..99q.141m&link_type=abstract

Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 99, No. 4, p.141

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

GAIA is a reconfirmed Cornerstone Mission of ESA, with an anticipated launch date of 2011. Its primary purpose is to study the kinematics and structure of the galaxy for which it will be equipped to do microarcsecond astrometry, multi-band photometry, and radial-velocity spectroscopy on a billion of the brightest stars. GAIA will carry out its five-year survey mission from the L2 point of the Earth's orbit. It is expected to discover of order one million eclipsing binaries, which alone may keep ground-based observatories busy on follow-up programs for decades to follow. Here we will review the general benefits of GAIA for stellar and galactic astronomy, and discuss its potential for SB2 eclipsing binaries in particular. A group headed by U. Munari (Univ. Padova) has demonstrated GAIA's importance in a series of tests of the precision and accuracy of fundamental stellar parameters from analyses of light and RV curves of selected systems. The trials conservatively make use only of Hipparcos-Tycho photometry and ground-based echelle spectroscopy matching GAIA's spectral (Ca triplet) region and approximate resolution (~12,000). Here, we describe the determinations of fundamental parameters for three of the most recently studied systems: SV Cam with complicated light curves and, in the data analyzed in this study, only 1 RV curve; BS Dra with nonsolar metallicity; and HP Dra with a small eccentricity and a significant time derivative of the argument of periastron. The latter two systems have partial, sparsely observed eclipses, which make the radiative properties difficult to determine. Although the three systems represent limiting cases, the results are nevertheless encouraging, with uncertainties in one or more components approaching 2% in some parameters, and derived distances falling close to or within the errors of the Hipparcos determinations, for all three systems. Some of the work described here was supported by NSERC grants to EFM.

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