Thirty Circumbinary Disk Occultation Systems (KH 15D-like stars) from the OGLE Project

TL;DR

This paper catalogs 30 candidate KH 15D-like binary systems with circumbinary disks causing periodic brightness variations, using long-term OGLE project light curves to analyze their eclipse behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a new catalog of circumbinary disk occultation systems with long-term observational data and spectral analysis, expanding understanding of such binary systems.

Findings

Identification of 30 candidate systems with long-term OGLE light curves.

Observation of changes in eclipse characteristics over many years.

Spectral data for three of the systems.

Abstract

We present a catalog of 30 stars that are candidates for KH 15D-like binary systems, in which the observed brightness variations are caused by a circumbinary dusty disk that periodically obscures at least one of the stellar components as it moves along its orbit. Thanks to the regular observations conducted within the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) project, we provide unique light curves in the I and V bands with very long time baselines, in some cases beginning as early as 1997 and extending to the present day. Such long-term monitoring allows us to identify changes in eclipse widths, amplitudes, and light-curve shapes on timescales of many years. We highlight several circumbinary disk occultation (CBO) systems of particular interest and present spectra for three of them.