Characterising eclipsing white dwarf M dwarf binaries from multi-band eclipse photometry

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-band eclipse photometry method to accurately determine the properties of white dwarf and M dwarf binaries, enabling efficient population studies and characterization of new systems without spectroscopy.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel photometric technique that achieves high-precision measurements of white dwarf and M dwarf parameters, applicable to large survey data like LSST.

Findings

White dwarf masses and temperatures can be measured to better than 5% accuracy.

M dwarf parameters are determined with better than 6% precision.

Three new post-common-envelope binaries are characterized, including systems with hot helium-core white dwarfs.

Abstract

With the prevalence of wide-field, time-domain photometric sky surveys, the number of eclipsing white dwarf systems being discovered is increasing dramatically. An efficient method to follow these up will be key to determining any population trends and finding any particularly interesting examples. We demonstrate that multi-band eclipse photometry of binaries containing a white dwarf and an M~dwarf can be used to determine the masses and temperatures of the white dwarfs to better than 5 per cent. For the M~dwarfs we measure their parameters to a precision of better than 6 per cent with the uncertainty dominated by the intrinsic scatter of the M~dwarf mass-radius relationship. This precision is better than what can typically be achieved with low-resolution spectroscopy. The nature of this method means that it will be applicable to LSST data in the future, enabling direct characterisation without follow-up spectroscopy. Additionally, we characterise three new post-common-envelope binaries from their eclipse photometry, finding two systems containing hot helium-core white dwarfs with low-mass companions (one near the brown dwarf transition regime) and a possible detached cataclysmic variable at the lower edge of the period gap.