My name is Matthew Knote and I'm a PhD student studying the O'Connell effect in Kepler eclipsing binaries. The O'Connell effect is a phenomenon in eclipsing binaries where the out-of-eclipse maxima are unequally bright. Despite being known for over a century, it's still poorly understood. I complied a list of 258 objects that Kepler observing showing the O'Connell effect. I gave a presentation on my research during the last AAVSO meeting (found here), where I was asked to provide this list of targets. The AAVSO posted it a week ago here (note that this is a slightly outdated version missing 2 systems), and a forum post quickly popped up over on the EB forum here. Gary Billings suggested I cross-post this here for more visibility.
The targets are somewhat faint, ranging from magnitude 10 to 18. All of them have a period under 10 days, and most of them under 1 day. They all have an amplitude above 0.01 mag, and most of them over 0.1 mag. My two main interests are in full-phase photometry in two or more colors and spectroscopy. Many systems also show large changes in their light curves on short (10-day) timescales. Periodic monitoring would be useful for such systems. On the other hand, others are very stable, so observations taken months or years apart can easily be combined.
I know that there are a lot of systems in the list, and a shorter one was suggested. I don't know the best way to do that without knowing what everyone's equipment is capable of, though. I've had two people contact me already and I've been able to point them to a few interesting targets. That may be the best way forward. My email is mknote2015@my.fit.edu. Be aware that I am deep in writing my dissertation, so I may not be able to respond quickly.
The main idea behind this project is to get a lot of data on O'Connell effect systems. I don't think the community is at the stage to answer what's causing it yet. My goal is to get data on these systems so that when we are at that stage, we have a lot of data to test our models with. I think that the AAVSO community can set the stage for that moment, and maybe we'll find something that'll point us in the direction of the answer.
-Matthew Knote
Hi Matthew,
do you have targets in the Southern Hemisphere? I have a remote site in Chile and would be willing to contribute in case of targets I am able to follow from the South.
Regards,
Josch
Unfortunately, I don't. My research focused very specifically on the original Kepler field in Cygnus. Believe me, I wish I had southern targets because it seems all the good NOAO spectrographs are in the Southern Hemisphere. A future goal of my project is to search K2 fields in the same way I did the original Kepler field, which will surely give southern targets, but I lack the time to do that at the moment.
Hello! I just took my first Kepler image - two stars were in the FOV. One is in the AAVSO database and the other is not.
How would you like the data handled? Sent to you or uploaded to the AAVSO? I can request the second Kepler star be added to the database. Best regards.
Mike