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Published December 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Tidal Synchronization and Differential Rotation of Kepler Eclipsing Binaries

Abstract

Few observational constraints exist for the tidal synchronization rate of late-type stars, despite its fundamental role in binary evolution. We visually inspected the light curves of 2278 eclipsing binaries (EBs) from the Kepler Eclipsing Binary Catalog to identify those with starspot modulations, as well as other types of out-of-eclipse variability. We report rotation periods for 816 EBs with starspot modulations, and find that 79% of EBs with orbital periods of less than 10 days are synchronized. However, a population of short-period EBs exists, with rotation periods typically 13% slower than synchronous, which we attribute to the differential rotation of high-latitude starspots. At 10 days, there is a transition from predominantly circular, synchronized EBs to predominantly eccentric, pseudosynchronized EBs. This transition period is in good agreement with the predicted and observed circularization period for Milky Way field binaries. At orbital periods greater than about 30 days, the amount of tidal synchronization decreases. We also report 12 previously unidentified candidate δ Scuti and γ Doradus pulsators, as well as a candidate RS CVn system with an evolved primary that exhibits starspot occultations. For short-period contact binaries, we observe a period–color relation and compare it to previous studies. As a whole, these results represent the largest homogeneous study of tidal synchronization of late-type stars.

Additional Information

© 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 July 18; revised 2017 October 12; accepted 2017 October 18; published 2017 November 22. This work was supported by NSF grant AST13-12453, the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences, the Washington Research Foundation, and the University of Washington Provost's Initiative for Data-Intensive Discovery. The authors are grateful to Brett Morris, Leslie Hebb, and Rory Barnes for helpful suggestions during the preparation of this paper. This work includes data collected by the Kepler mission. Funding for the Kepler mission is provided by the NASA Science Mission Directorate. This work has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. Facility: Kepler - The Kepler Mission. Software: gatspy (VanderPlas & Ivezić 2015; VanderPlas 2016), h5py (Andrew Collette and contributors, 2008, http://h5py.alfven.org), IPython (Pérez & Granger 2007), kplr (Daniel Foreman-Mackey, http://dan.iel.fm/kplr), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (van der Walt et al. 2011), Pandas (McKinney 2010), SciPy (Jones et al. 2001).

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Published - Lurie_2017_AJ_154_250.pdf

Submitted - 1710.07339.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 17, 2023