S. Faigler, T. Mazeh, S. N. Quinn, D. W. Latham, L. Tal-Or
We present seven newly discovered non-eclipsing short-period binary systems
with low-mass companions, identified by the recently introduced BEER algorithm,
applied to the publicly available 138-day photometric light curves obtained by
the Kepler mission. The detection is based on the beaming effect (sometimes
called Doppler boosting), which increases (decreases) the brightness of any
light source approaching (receding from) the observer, enabling a prediction of
the stellar Doppler radial-velocity modulation from its precise photometry. The
BEER algorithm identifies the BEaming periodic modulation, with a combination
of the well known Ellipsoidal and Reflection/heating periodic effects, induced
by short-period companions. The seven detections were confirmed by
spectroscopic radial-velocity follow-up observations, indicating minimum
secondary masses in the range of 0.07-0.4 Msun. The discovered binaries
establish for the first time the feasibility of the BEER algorithm as a new
detection method for short-period non-eclipsing binaries, with the potential to
detect in the near future non-transiting brown dwarfs secondaries, or even
massive planets.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2133
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