Austrian Early Career Conference 2024

Contribution:
Poster

Authors:
Yannis Marx

Affiliations:
Karl Franzens Universität

Title:
Red giant binaries as seen from TESS and Kepler

Abstract:
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has been observing more than 1.5 billion stars since it’s launch in 2018. Some of these stars have previously been observed by the Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler has delivered photometric data of the same stars for 4 years. This gives us an opportunity to compare the newly acquired data of TESS with the already well established data of Kepler. Aims: We aim to compare the photometric data of TESS with the successful data of Kepler, using the unique features of binary star systems, containing a red giant component. We also seek to calculate new periods for the binary systems, using the combined data of Kepler and TESS. We extracted the photometric flux from the target-pixel data and processed the photometric data of 17 different binary stars reported by Beck et al. (2014). For that we used the Lightkurve Python package and the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) to download and process the data. The comparison was done by combining both data sets into one combined phase diagram for each binary system. The thesis presents phase diagrams of 17 eccentric binary systems, which contain a red giant component. These phase diagrams contain data from both Kepler and TESS telescopes. For 10 of them, the joint TESS and Kepler data contained either the eclipses or flux modulation of tidal distortion. This allowed us the calculation of 10 new precise periods for these systems. With the help of the combined phase diagrams we could compare the photometric data of both space telescopes. They show similarities in the observed features of the binary systems, but also strong differences in the quality of those observations due to their different telescope apertures. We analysed these differences in the data and gave possible explanations for them.