The Eta Carinae optical 2009.0 event, a new "eclipse-like" phenomenon

TL;DR

This study presents detailed optical photometry of Eta Carinae's 2009 event, revealing an eclipse-like phenomenon that supports the binary system hypothesis and refines its orbital period.

Contribution

The paper provides comprehensive multi-band photometric data of Eta Carinae's 2009 event, identifying an eclipse-like feature and refining the orbital period estimate.

Findings

Observed eclipse-like features during the 2009 event

Refined the orbital period to 2022.8 days

Supported the binary system hypothesis for Eta Carinae

Abstract

The periodic events occurring in Eta Carinae have been widely monitored during the last three 5.5-year cycles. The last one recently occurred in January 2009 and more exhaustive observations have been made at different wavelength ranges. If these events are produced when the binary components approach periastron, the timing and sampling of the photometric features can provide more information about the geometry and physics of the system. Thus, we continued with our ground-based optical photometric campaign started in 2003 to record the behaviour of the 2009.0 event in detail. This time the observation program included a new telescope to obtain information from other photometric bands. The daily monitoring consists of the acquisition of CCD images through standard UBVRI filters and a narrow Halpha passband. The subsequent differential photometry includes the central region of the object and the whole Homunculus nebula. The results of our relative UBVRIHalpha photometry, performed from November 2008 up to the end of March 2009, are presented in this work, which comprises the totality of the event. The initial rising branch, the maximum, the dip to the minimum and the recovering rising phase strongly resemble a kind of eclipse. All these features happened on time - according to that predicted - although there are some photometric differences in comparison with the previous event. We made a new determination of 2022.8 days for the period value using the present and previous "eclipse-like" event data. These results strongly support the binarity hypothesis for Eta Car. In this paper, the complete dataset with the photometry of the 2009.0 event is provided to make it readily available for further analysis.