Heartbeat stars and the ringing of tidal pulsations

García, RA, Hambleton, K, Kurtz, DW orcid iconORCID: 0000-0002-1015-3268, Prsa, A, Fuller, J, Thompson (SU), S and Ballot, J (2015) Heartbeat stars and the ringing of tidal pulsations. EPJ Web of Conferences, 101 . 04007. ISSN 2100-014X

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201510104007

Abstract

With the advent of high precision photometry from satellites such as Kepler and CoRoT, a whole new layer of interesting and astounding astronomical objects has been revealed: heartbeat stars are an example of such objects. Heartbeat stars are eccen- tric ellipsoidal variables that undergo strong tidal interactions when the stars are almost in contact at the time of closest approach. These interactions deform of the stars and cause a notable light curve variation in the form of a tidal pulse. A subset of these objects (∼20%) show prominent tidally induced pulsations: pulsations forced by the binary orbit. We now have a fully functional code that models binary star features (using phoebe) and stellar pulsations simultaneously, enabling a complete and accurate heartbeat star model to be determined. In this paper we show the results of our new code, which uses emcee, a variant of mcmc, to generate a full set of stellar parameters. We further highlight the interesting features of KIC 8164262, including its tidally induced pulsations and resonantly locked pulsations.


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