An Observer's Nightmare: 3 Vulpeculae

Details An Observer's Nightmare: 3 Vulpeculae An Observer's Nightmare: 3 Vulpeculae

May 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003aas...202.0807d&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 202, #08.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, p.708

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Astronomers often observe phenomena that vary with time. Many techniques have been developed to extract any underlying periodicities from their observations. Unlike other fields that deal with time series analysis, astronomy is unique in our inability to obtain continuous data strings and equally spaced data. These constraints introduce the problem of aliases into our determination of real periodicities. Aliases arise from our inability to know what the star is doing during the daylight hours from a single site or from the annual passage of the sun near the star. Ideal candidates for period determination are stars with periods not equal to a simple fraction (or multiple) of a day or a year. If a malevolent astronomer were to design a star which would be a true nightmare 3 Vul would be a good model.
3 Vul was classified has a 53 Persei star in a binary system by Hube & Aikman (1991, PASP, 103, 49). Its strongest photometric period has a frequency of 0.9719 c/d while its orbital period is 367.76 days. From our observations we have identified 2 to 4 other periods. In addition using the models of Townsend (2002, MNRAS, 330, 855) we have been able to match our frequencies with non-radial, l = 1, modes. From this comparison we have determined a mass of the primary of 4.16 M&sun; and an age of approximately 25 million years. Finally we have a re-determined the binary orbit and found that the secondary has a probable mass of between 0.65 and 1.0 M&sun; .
This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France and has been funded by NSF Grants #AST86-16362, #AST91-15114, #AST95-28906, and #AST-0071260 all to the College of Charleston.

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