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from the not-the-kind-of-eclipse-we're-accustomed-to dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Detached, double-lined, eclipsing spectroscopic binaries are crucial for astronomers testing stellar models. This is due to the fact that the masses and radii of both stars can be directly measured from the light and radial velocity curves of the system.
[...] To date, several tens of eclipsing binaries (EBs) have been detected in NGC 2264, and one of them is Mon-735, identified by observations with NASA's Spitzer spacecraft. A team of astronomers led by Edward Gillen of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, took a closer look at Mon-735 in order to get more insights into the nature of this system. For this purpose, they re-analyzed the archival Spitzer data and conducted follow-up observations of this binary using the Keck HIRES spectrograph.
[...] According to the paper, Mon-735 consists of PMS M dwarfs with masses of about 0.29 and 0.26 solar masses, radii of 0.76 and 0.75 solar radii, and effective temperatures of 3,260 and 3,213 K. The system is estimated to be between 7 and 9 million years old.
[...] "CoRoT 223992193 and Mon-735 are the first two low-mass EBs to come out of the CoRoT and Spitzer observations of NGC 2264, with more systems in preparation. These will form a powerful sample of near-coeval EB systems, formed from the same parent molecular cloud, with which to test PMS stellar evolution theory and better understand both the age of, and age spread within, the NGC 2264 region," the authors of the paper concluded.
Journal Reference:
Edward Gillen, Lynne A. Hillenbrand, John Stauffer, Suzanne Aigrain, Luisa Rebull, Ann Marie Cody. "Mon-735: A new low-mass pre-main sequence eclipsing binary in NGC 2264", arXiv:2004.04753 [astro-ph.SR] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04753
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:22AM
> Detached, double-lined, eclipsing spectroscopic binaries are crucial for astronomers testing stellar models. This is due to the fact that the masses and radii of both stars can be directly measured from the light and radial velocity curves of the system.
I am not an astrophysicist, but let me interpret a bit:
These are really interesting star systems. Two stars spinning around each other, where one star passes in front of the other ("eclipsing"). By measuring the brightness of the stars as they pass in front of each other, we can figure out how big they are (radius), and how frequently they block each other out (revolution frequency). By measuring the red shift (google it) we can figure out how fast they are moving as the orbit progresses. This is loads of information, in fact everything we need to calculate mass and radius of the stars, assuming only Newtonian gravity. Normally we can only measure brightness and colour - we infer mass and radius from models. So if we can measure mass and radius (and brightness and colour) we can test our models. That's great!
* NGC 2264 references a star cluster.
* Spitzer and Corot are space telescopes.
* Keck is an observatory.