Expected Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Yield of Eclipsing Binary Stars

TL;DR

This study estimates LSST's capability to detect and characterize millions of eclipsing binary stars, highlighting its potential to significantly advance stellar astrophysics through large-scale data analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a comprehensive simulation of LSST's yield of eclipsing binaries and evaluates the effectiveness of period-finding and parameter recovery pipelines.

Findings

Approximately 6.7 million eclipsing binaries will be fully characterized.

Around 1.7 million will be double-lined binaries, valuable for detailed stellar studies.

About 28% of observed binaries can be effectively analyzed with the pipelines.

Abstract

In this paper we estimate the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) yield of eclipsing binary stars, which will survey ~20,000 square degrees of the southern sky during the period of 10 years in 6 photometric passbands to r ~ 24.5. We generate a set of 10,000 eclipsing binary light curves sampled to the LSST time cadence across the whole sky, with added noise as a function of apparent magnitude. This set is passed to the Analysis of Variance (AoV) period finder to assess the recoverability rate for the periods, and the successfully phased light curves are passed to the artificial intelligence-based pipeline EBAI to assess the recoverability rate in terms of the eclipsing binaries' physical and geometric parameters. We find that, out of ~24 million eclipsing binaries observed by LSST with S/N>10 in mission life-time, ~28% or 6.7 million can be fully characterized by the pipeline. Of those, ~25% or 1.7 million will be double-lined binaries, a true treasure trove for stellar astrophysics.