Long-Term Photometry of IC 348 with the YETI Network

TL;DR

This study presents a 2.4-year photometric survey of IC 348, identifying numerous new variable stars and binary systems, and analyzing their rotation periods and properties with implications for stellar evolution.

Contribution

The paper provides the first extensive long-term photometric dataset of IC 348, discovering new variable stars and binary systems, and analyzing rotation period distribution without finding bimodality.

Findings

87 stars identified as periodically variable, 33 new reports

Discovered a close eclipsing binary with a low-mass component

Detected three detached binaries and confirmed a fourth

Abstract

We present long-term photometric observations of the young open cluster IC 348 with a baseline time-scale of 2.4 yr. Our study was conducted with several telescopes from the Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI) network in the Bessel $R$ band to find periodic variability of young stars. We identified 87 stars in IC 348 to be periodically variable; 33 of them were unreported before. Additionally, we detected 61 periodic non-members of which 41 are new discoveries. Our wide field of view was the key to those numerous newly found variable stars. The distribution of rotation periods in IC 348 has always been of special interest. We investigate it further with our newly detected periods but we cannot find a statistically significant bimodality. We also report the detection of a close eclipsing binary in IC 348 composed of a low-mass stellar component ($M \gtrsim 0.09\,\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$) and a K0 pre-main sequence star ($M \approx 2.7\,\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$). Furthermore, we discovered three detached binaries among the background stars in our field of view and confirmed the period of a fourth one.