A highly inclined orbit for the 110 day period m-dwarf companion KOI-368.01

George Zhou, Chelsea X. Huang

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    22 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We report the detection of asymmetry in the transit light curves of the 110 day period companion to KOI-368, a rapidly rotating A-dwarf. The significant distortion in the transit light curve is attributed to spin-orbit misalignment between the transiting companion and the gravity darkened host star. Our analysis was based on 11 long cadence and 2 short cadence transits of KOI-368.01 from the Kepler mission, as well as stellar parameters determined from our follow-up spectroscopic observation. We measured the true obliquity between the orbit normal and the stellar rotation axis to be . We also find a secondary eclipse event with depth 29 ± 3 ppm at phase 0.59, from which the temperature of the companion is constrained to 3060 ± 50 K, indicating that KOI-368.01 is a late M-dwarf. The eccentricity is also calculated from the eclipse to be 0.1429 ± 0.0007. The long period, high obliquity, and low eccentricity of KOI-368.01 allow us to limit a number of proposed theories for the misalignment of binary systems.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article numberL35
    JournalAstrophysical Journal Letters
    Volume776
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 20 Oct 2013

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