Rotational Doppler beaming in eclipsing binaries

Abstract

In eclipsing binaries the stellar rotation of the two components will cause a rotational Doppler beaming during eclipse ingress and egress when only part of the eclipsed component is covered. For eclipsing binaries with fast spinning components this photometric analog of the well-known spectroscopic Rossiter-McLaughlin effect can exceed the strength of the orbital effect. Example light curves are shown for a detached double white dwarf binary, a massive O-star binary and a transiting exoplanet case, similar to WASP-33b. Inclusion of the rotational Doppler beaming in eclipsing systems is a prerequisite for deriving the correct stellar parameters from fitting high-quality photometric light curves and can be used to determine stellar obliquities as well as, e.g., an independent measure of the rotational velocity in those systems that may be expected to be fully synchronized. © 2012 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.