Astronomy Tea Talk

Traditionally, in stellar binary systems photometry is used mostly to measure eclipse light curves and infer the objects' size, and spectroscopy (Doppler) to measure radial velocity curves and derive the components' orbits and masses. Kepler's high precision and continuous photometry allows us to use photometry to study the orbit, and reveal the existence of non-eclipsing binary companions. Orbital photometry includes three modulations correlated with the orbit: beaming, tidal ellipsoidal deformation and reflection/heating. I will describe this new approach, present some of the already published results and show some preliminary results from on-going projects. Those include looking for orbital photometry, including beaming, in known transiting systems, and looking for new non-eclipsing systems using photometry. Time allowing, I will discuss also the use of photometry to measure spin-orbit alignment.