The MUCHFUSS photometric campaign

¹ Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Kepler Center for Astro and Particle Physics, Eberhard Karls University, Sand 1, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: schaffenroth@astro.uni-tuebingen.de
² Institut für Astro- und Teilchenphysik, Universität Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 25/8, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
³ Dr. Remeis-Observatory & ECAP, Astronomical Institute, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Sternwartstr. 7, 96049 Bamberg, Germany
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
⁵ Argelander Institute for Astronomy, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany

Received: 26 September 2016
Accepted: 9 February 2018

Abstract

Hot subdwarfs (sdO/Bs) are the helium-burning cores of red giants, which have lost almost all of their hydrogen envelope. This mass loss is often triggered by common envelope interactions with close stellar or even substellar companions. Cool companions like late-type stars or brown dwarfs are detectable via characteristic light-curve variations like reflection effects and often also eclipses. To search for such objects, we obtained multi-band light curves of 26 close sdO/B binary candidates from the MUCHFUSS project with the BUSCA instrument. We discovered a new eclipsing reflection effect system (P = 0.168938 d) with a low-mass M dwarf companion (0.116 M_⊙). Three more reflection effect binaries found in the course of the campaign have already been published; two of them are eclipsing systems, and in one system only showing the reflection effect but no eclipses, the sdB primary is found to be pulsating. Amongst the targets without reflection effect a new long-period sdB pulsator was discovered and irregular light variations were found in two sdO stars. The found light variations allowed us to constrain the fraction of reflection effect binaries and the substellar companion fraction around sdB stars. The minimum fraction of reflection effect systems amongst the close sdB binaries might be greater than 15% and the fraction of close substellar companions in sdB binaries may be as high as 8.0%. This would result in a close substellar companion fraction to sdB stars of about 3%. This fraction is much higher than the fraction of brown dwarfs around possible progenitor systems, which are solar-type stars with substellar companions around 1 AU, as well as close binary white dwarfs with brown dwarf companions. This might suggest that common envelope interactions with substellar objects are preferentially followed by a hot subdwarf phase.