Beaming Binaries - a New Observational Category of Photometric Binary Stars

TL;DR

The paper discusses a new class of binary stars detectable through relativistic beaming effects in photometric data from space missions like CoRoT and Kepler, enabling novel insights into stellar properties.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of photometric beaming binary stars and explores how their flux variations can reveal spectral information and binary characteristics.

Findings

Relativistic beaming dominates in binaries with periods over 10 days.

Photometric variations can provide spectral information even for single stars.

CoRoT and Kepler can identify this new class of binary stars.

Abstract

The new photometric space-borne survey missions CoRoT and Kepler will be able to detect minute flux variations in binary stars due to relativistic beaming caused by the line-of-sight motion of their components. In all but very short period binaries (P>10d), these variations will dominate over the ellipsoidal and reflection periodic variability. Thus, CoRoT and Kepler will discover a new observational class: photometric beaming binary stars. We examine this new category and the information that the photometric variations can provide. The variations that result from the observatory heliocentric velocity can be used to extract some spectral information even for single stars.