Image of Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter's tea party You are cordially invited to afternoon tea and biscuits wine and chocolate

Astronomy Tea Talks at Caltech

Mondays, Hameetman auditorium (Cahill)
Tea:  4.00pm
Talk: 4.15pm

Organized by:

2011 - 2012 season:
19 September 2011 Avi Shporer (UCSB)

'Doing More with Photometry: Studying binary companions with orbital photometry'

Traditionally, in stellar binary systems photometry is used mostly to measure eclipse light curves and infer the objects' size, and spectroscopy (Doppler) to measure radial velocity curves and derive the components' orbits and masses. Kepler's high precision and continuous photometry allows us to use photometry to study the orbit, and reveal the existence of non-eclipsing binary companions. Orbital photometry includes three modulations correlated with the orbit: beaming, tidal ellipsoidal deformation and reflection/heating. I will describe this new approach, present some of the already published results and show some preliminary results from on-going projects. Those include looking for orbital photometry, including beaming, in known transiting systems, and looking for new non-eclipsing systems using photometry. Time allowing, I will discuss also the use of photometry to measure spin-orbit alignment.
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Last modified on 19th Sep 2011 by Marco Viero.  

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