The SERMON project: 48 new field Blazhko stars and an investigation of modulation-period distribution

TL;DR

This study analyzed over a thousand RR Lyrae stars to identify Blazhko effect stars, discovering 48 new cases and revealing that their modulation periods follow a log-normal distribution, with implications for understanding stellar pulsation behaviors.

Contribution

The paper presents the identification of 48 new Blazhko stars and provides a detailed analysis of their modulation-period distribution, highlighting the Gaussian nature of pulsation periods and the log-normal distribution of modulation periods.

Findings

Identified 48 new Blazhko stars from ASAS data.

Modulation periods follow a log-normal distribution centered at 1.78 dex.

Pulsation periods follow a Gaussian distribution with mean 0.54 days.

Abstract

We investigated 1234 fundamental mode RR Lyrae stars observed by the All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) to identify the Blazhko (BL) effect. A sample of 1547 BL stars from the literature was collected to compare the modulation-period distribution with stars newly identified in our sample. A classical frequency spectra analysis was performed using Period04 software. Data points from each star from the ASAS database were analysed individually to avoid confusion with artificial peaks and aliases. Statistical methods were used in the investigation of the modulation-period distribution. Altogether we identified 87 BL stars (48 new detections), 7 candidate stars, and 22 stars showing long-term period variations. The distribution of modulation periods of newly identified BL stars corresponds well to the distribution of modulation periods of stars located in the Galactic field, Galactic bulge, Large Magellanic Cloud, and globular cluster M5 collected from the literature. As a very important by-product of this comparison, we found that pulsation periods of BL stars follow Gaussian distribution with the mean period of $0.54\pm0.07$ d, while the modulation periods show log-normal distribution with centre at $\log(P_{\rm m}~{\rm [d]})=1.78\pm0.30$ dex. This means that 99.7 % of all known modulated stars have BL periods between 7.6 and 478 days. We discuss the identification of long modulation periods and show, that a significant percentage of stars showing long-term period variations could be classified as BL stars.