Description:

Title: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eclipsing Binaries

Speaker: Maxwell Moe, University of Arizona

Host: Diego Munoz

Abstract: Wide-field photometric surveys have discovered hundreds of thousands of eclipsing binaries (EBs), and Gaia, TESS, and LSST will soon discover millions more. EBs provide the fundamental stellar relations and the most accurate distances to local group galaxies, and we are continuously finding new ways to utilize EBs as precise astrophysical tools. For example, collaborators and I developed a novel method for measuring the ages, masses, eccentricities, and dust extinctions of EBs based solely on their photometric light curves. By age-dating large samples of EBs, we have measured the acceleration of H II regions due to stellar feedback, calibrated the anti-correlation between dust extinction and age, found empirical evidence for an important tidal dissipation mechanism, and discovered a new class of nascent EBs with extreme mass ratios. I will discuss how the statistics of EBs provide stringent tests for models of protobinary fragmentation, accretion, and orbital migration. In addition, the updated multiplicity statistics serve as reliable initial conditions for binary population synthesis studies, revealing new insights into the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae, X-ray binaries, and sources of gravitational waves. I will end by highlighting the VARiability Survey of the TriAngulum GAlaxy (VARSTAGA), the first simultaneously deep and high-cadence survey of a local group galaxy specifically designed to discover unique classes of EBs, variables, and transients.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics