Saturday, 19. August 2006
I have managed to produce a nice A0 poster for the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Prague next week. The title is "
Eclipsing Binaries from Space". I have used photometry from WIRE to monitor three bright detached eclipsing binaries (dEBs). These "double stars" are interesting because they can be used as a way to determine the relative radii of the stars with
high accuracy (better than 1% -- that's difficult to achieve for single stars). Furthermore, my fellow astronomer
John Southworth will collect new spectroscopy of the systems and we will then be able to determine absolute radii and masses. These values can be compared directly to theoretical models for single stars. Such
models are important in many key areas of astronomy. For example they are used constrain the age of stellar clusters and the properties of distant galaxies. In total we expect to collect WIRE data (thanks to Derek L. Buzasi at USAFA and the WIRE team!) for 10-12 dEBs during the coming year.