Tidal perturbations and eclipse mapping in the pulsations in the hierarchical triple system U Gru

¹ Department of Astrophysics, IMAPP, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9010 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
e-mail: cole.johnston@ru.nl
² Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200D, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
³ Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia

Received: 23 August 2022
Accepted: 10 October 2022

Abstract

Context. Unambiguous examples of the influence of tides on self-excited, free stellar pulsations have recently been observationally detected in space-based photometric data.

Aims. We aim to investigate U Gru and contextualise it within the growing class of tidally influenced pulsators. An initial analysis of U Gru revealed frequencies spaced by the orbital frequency that are difficult to explain by currently proposed tidal mechanisms.

Methods. We reinvestigate the TESS photometry for U Gru alongside new UVES spectroscopy. We analyse the UVES spectroscopy with least-squares deconvolution and spectral disentangling techniques, and perform an atmospheric analysis. We remove the binary signature from the light curve using an effective model in order to investigate the pulsation signal in the residuals. We track the amplitudes and phases of the residual pulsations as a function of the orbital period to reveal their tidal influence.

Results. We establish that U Gru is likely a hierarchical triple system. We identify a single p-mode oscillation that exhibits amplitude and phase variation over the binary orbit. We propose a toy model to demonstrate that the series of frequencies separated by the orbital frequency can be reproduced by eclipse mapping. We find no evidence of modulation to the other independent oscillation modes.

Conclusions. We demonstrate that U Gru hosts at least one tidally perturbed pulsation. Additionally, we argue that eclipse mapping of the dominant, tidally perturbed mode can produce the series of frequencies separated by the observed orbital frequency. Our simulations show that the effects of eclipse mapping are mode dependent, and are not expected to produce an observable signature for all pulsation modes in an eclipsing binary.