Seven new binaries discovered in the Kepler light curves through the BEER method confirmed by radial-velocity observations

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of seven non-eclipsing short-period binary systems with low-mass companions using the BEER algorithm on Kepler data, confirmed by radial-velocity observations, demonstrating a new detection method for such binaries.

Contribution

The study introduces and validates the BEER algorithm as a novel method for detecting non-eclipsing short-period binaries using photometric data.

Findings

Seven new binaries confirmed by radial velocities.

BEER algorithm successfully detects non-eclipsing binaries.

Potential to discover brown dwarfs and massive planets.

Abstract

We present seven newly discovered non-eclipsing short-period binary systems with low-mass companions, identified by the recently introduced BEER algorithm, applied to the publicly available 138-day photometric light curves obtained by the Kepler mission. The detection is based on the beaming effect (sometimes called Doppler boosting), which increases (decreases) the brightness of any light source approaching (receding from) the observer, enabling a prediction of the stellar Doppler radial-velocity modulation from its precise photometry. The BEER algorithm identifies the BEaming periodic modulation, with a combination of the well known Ellipsoidal and Reflection/heating periodic effects, induced by short-period companions. The seven detections were confirmed by spectroscopic radial-velocity follow-up observations, indicating minimum secondary masses in the range of 0.07-0.4 Msun. The discovered binaries establish for the first time the feasibility of the BEER algorithm as a new detection method for short-period non-eclipsing binaries, with the potential to detect in the near future non-transiting brown dwarfs secondaries, or even massive planets.