Systematic search for stellar pulsators in the eclipsing binaries observed by Kepler

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: gaulme@mps.mpg.de
² Department of Astronomy, New Mexico State University, PO Box 30001, MSC 4500, Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001, USA
³ Los Alamos National Laboratory, XTD-NTA, MS T086, Los Alamos, NM 87545-2345, USA

Received: 2 May 2019
Accepted: 16 August 2019

Abstract

Eclipsing binaries (EBs) are unique targets for measuring precise stellar properties and can be used to constrain stellar evolution models. In particular, it is possible to measure masses and radii of both components of a double-lined spectroscopic EB at the percent level. Since the advent of high-precision photometric space missions (MOST, CoRoT, Kepler, BRITE, TESS), the use of stellar pulsation properties to infer stellar interiors and dynamics constitutes a revolution for studies of low-mass stars. The Kepler mission has led to the discovery of thousands of classical pulsators such as δ Scuti and solar-like oscillators (main sequence and evolved), but also almost 3000 EBs with orbital periods shorter than 1100 days. We report the first systematic search for stellar pulsators in the entire Kepler EB catalog. The focus is mainly aimed at discovering δ Scuti, γ Doradus, red giant, and tidally excited pulsators. We developed a data inspection tool (DIT) that automatically produces a series of plots from the Kepler light curves that allows us to visually identify whether stellar oscillations are present in a given time series. We applied the DIT to the whole Kepler EB database and identified 303 systems whose light curves display oscillations, including 163 new discoveries. A total of 149 stars are flagged as δ Scuti (100 from this paper), 115 as γ Doradus (69 new), 85 as red giants (27 new), and 59 as tidally excited oscillators (29 new). There is some overlap among these groups, as some display several types of oscillations. Despite the likelihood that many of these systems are false positives, for example, when an EB light curve is blended with a pulsator, this catalog gathers a vast sample of systems that are valuable for a better understanding of stellar evolution.