Journal
ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL
Volume 155, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aaaaaf
Keywords
blue stragglers; techniques: photometric; techniques: radial velocities; white dwarfs
Categories
Funding
- Spanish MICINN [AyA2011-24052]
- Japan Society for Promotion of Science [17K14246]
- Astrobiology Center from NINS
- NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program
- JSPS Core-to-Core Program Planet2
- Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [17K14246, 26220704] Funding Source: KAKEN
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We report the discovery of three edge-on binaries with white dwarf (WD) companions that gravitationally magnify (instead of eclipsing) the light of their stellar primaries, as revealed by a systematic search for pulses with long periods in the Kepler photometry. We jointly model the self-lensing light curves and radial-velocity orbits to derive the WD masses, all of which are close to 0.6 solar masses. The orbital periods are long, ranging from 419 to 728 days, and the eccentricities are low, all less than 0.2. These characteristics are reminiscent of the orbits found for many blue stragglers in open clusters and the field, for which stable mass transfer due to Roche-lobe overflow from an evolving primary (now a WD) has been proposed as the formation mechanism. Because the actual masses for our three WD companions have been accurately determined, these self-lensing systems would provide excellent tests for models of interacting binaries.
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