BU Canis Minoris -- the Most Compact Known Flat Doubly Eclipsing Quadruple System

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery and detailed analysis of BU CMi, the most compact known flat doubly eclipsing quadruple star system with an outer period of only 121 days, using spectro-photodynamical modeling.

Contribution

It provides the first accurate determination of BU CMi's outer period and orbital configuration, correcting previous misidentifications and demonstrating a complex spectro-photodynamical analysis approach.

Findings

BU CMi has an outer period of 121 days, the shortest known for such systems.

All four stars are within about 0.1 solar mass of 2.4 solar masses.

The system shows mutual orbital alignment within 1 degree.

Abstract

We have found that the 2+2 quadruple star system BU CMi is currently the most compact quadruple system known, with an extremely short outer period of only 121 days. The previous record holder was TIC 219006972 (Kostov et al. 2023), with a period of 168 days. The quadruple nature of BU CMi was established by Volkov et al. (2021), but they misidentified the outer period as 6.6 years. BU CMi contains two eclipsing binaries (EBs), each with a period near 3 days, and a substantial eccentricity of about 0.22. All four stars are within about 0.1 solar mass of 2.4 solar masses. Both binaries exhibit dynamically driven apsidal motion with fairly short apsidal periods of about 30 years, thanks to the short outer orbital period. The outer period of 121 days is found both from the dynamical perturbations, with this period imprinted on the eclipse timing variations (ETV) curve of each EB by the other binary, and by modeling the complex line profiles in a collection of spectra. We find that the three orbital planes are all mutually aligned to within 1 degree, but the overall system has an inclination angle near 83.5 degrees. We utilize a complex spectro-photodynamical analysis to compute and tabulate all the interesting stellar and orbital parameters of the system. Finally, we also find an unexpected dynamical perturbation on a timescale of several years whose origin we explore. This latter effect was misinterpreted by Volkov et al. (2021) and led them to conclude that the outer period was 6.6 years rather than the 121 days that we establish here.