Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS
Volume 881, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab321b
Keywords
techniques: photometric; techniques: radial velocities; white dwarfs
Categories
Funding
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [JP17K14246, JP18H01247, JP18H04577]
- JSPS Core-to-Core Program Planet2
- Einstein Fellowship Program
- NASA Science Mission directorate
- NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program
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We report the discovery of the fifth self-lensing binary in which a low-mass white dwarf (WD) gravitationally magnifies its 15th magnitude G-star companion, KIC 8145411, during eclipses. The system was identified from a pair of such self-lensing events in the Kepler photometry, and was followed up with the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES) on the 1.5 m telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory and the High-Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) on the Subaru 8.2 m telescope. A joint analysis of the TRES radial velocities, the HDS spectrum, and the Kepler photometry of the primary star determines the WD mass 0.20 +/- 0.01 M-circle dot, orbital semimajor axis 1.28 +/- 0.03 au, and orbital eccentricity 0.14 +/- 0.02. Because such extremely low-mass WDs cannot be formed in isolation within the age of the Galaxy, their formation is believed to involve binary interactions that truncated evolution of the WD progenitor. However, the observed orbit of the KIC 8145411 system is at least 10 times wider than required for this scenario to work. The presence of this system in the Kepler sample, along with its similarities to field blue straggler binaries presumably containing WDs, may suggest that some 10% of post-asymptotic giant branch binaries with Sun-like primaries contain such anomalous WDs.
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