Radial Velocity
I had mentioned in a previous post that a couple of the “new” variable stars I had published were given names by the General Catalog of Variable Stars (GCVS). One of them, V2612 Oph, has been looked at by a few other researchers.
The image above shows the radial velocity curve of this star (Pribulla 2007). It shows how the two objects in this binary system are moving towards us (negative velocities) and away from us (positive velocities) as they go around their orbit. You can see that one star is moving around a lot more than the other star. That’s the lighter of the two stars. From this analysis they were able to determine the mass ratio to be M2/M1 = 2/7. So one of the stars is 3.5 times more massive than the other.
When you put photometric data (i.e. light curves) together with radial velocity data, you can get a very, very good model of the system. I just may do that!
Thursday, April 12, 2007