Detached eclipsing binaries from the Kepler field: radii and photometric masses of components in short-period systems

TL;DR

This study uses a purely photometric approach to characterize low-mass detached eclipsing binaries from Kepler data, providing model-independent stellar parameters to test stellar evolution theories.

Contribution

It introduces a novel photometric method for deriving stellar parameters of low-mass binaries, avoiding the need for spectroscopic radial velocity measurements.

Findings

Confirmed the mass-radius inflation trend in low-mass stars.

Derived effective temperatures and photometric masses for binary components.

Provided insights into stellar structure and evolution in the low-mass regime.

Abstract

The characterisation of detached eclipsing binaries with low mass components has become important when verifying the role of convection in stellar evolutionary models, which requires model-independent measurements of stellar parameters with great precision. However, spectroscopic characterisation depends on single-target radial velocity observations and only a few tens of well-studied low-mass systems have been diagnosed in this way. We characterise eclipsing detached systems from the {\it Kepler} field with low mass components by adopting a purely-photometric method. Based on an extensive multi-colour dataset, we derive effective temperatures and photometric masses of individual components using clustering techniques. We also estimate the stellar radii from additional modelling of the available {\it Kepler} light curves. Our measurements confirm the presence of an inflation trend in the mass-radius diagram against theoretical stellar models in the low-mass regime.