4.8 Article

The dynamical mass of a classical Cepheid variable star in an eclipsing binary system

Journal

NATURE
Volume 468, Issue 7323, Pages 542-544

Publisher

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature09598

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Chilean Center for Astrophysics FONDAP
  2. BASAL Centro de Astrofisica y Tecnologias Afines (CATA)
  3. NSF
  4. Polish Ministry of Science
  5. Foundation for Polish Science (FOCUS, TEAM)
  6. GEMINI-CONICYT
  7. European Research Council

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Stellar pulsation theory provides a means of determining the masses of pulsating classical Cepheid supergiants-it is the pulsation that causes their luminosity to vary. Such pulsational masses are found to be smaller than the masses derived from stellar evolution theory: this is the Cepheid mass discrepancy problem(1,2), for which a solution is missing(3-5). An independent, accurate dynamical mass determination for a classical Cepheid variable star (as opposed to type-II Cepheids, low-mass stars with a very different evolutionary history) in a binary system is needed in order to determine which is correct. The accuracy of previous efforts to establish a dynamical Cepheid mass from Galactic single-lined non-eclipsing binaries was typically about 15-30% (refs 6, 7), which is not good enough to resolve the mass discrepancy problem. In spite of many observational efforts(8,9), no firm detection of a classical Cepheid in an eclipsing double-lined binary has hitherto been reported. Here we report the discovery of a classical Cepheid in a well detached, double-lined eclipsing binary in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We determine the mass to a precision of 1% and show that it agrees with its pulsation mass, providing strong evidence that pulsation theory correctly and precisely predicts the masses of classical Cepheids.

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