Tracking the stellar longitudes of starspots in short-period Kepler binaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report on a new method for tracking the phases of the orbital modulations in very short-period, near-contact, and contact binary systems in order to follow starspots. We apply this technique to Kepler light curves for 414 binary systems that were identified as having anticorrelated O−C curves for the mid-times of the primary and secondary eclipses, or in the case of non-eclipsing systems, their light-curve minima. This phase tracking approach extracts more information about starspot and binary system behaviour than may be easily obtained from the O−C curves. We confirm the hypothesis of Tran et al. that we can successfully follow the rotational motions of spots on the surfaces of the stars in these binaries. In ∼34 per cent of the systems, the spot rotation is retrograde as viewed in the frame rotating with the orbital motion, while ∼13 per cent show significant prograde spot rotation. The remaining systems show either little spot rotation or erratic behaviour, or sometimes include intervals of both types of behaviour. We discuss the possibility that the relative motions of spots are related to differential rotation of the stars. It is clear from this study that the motions of the starspots in at least 50 per cent of these short-period binaries are not exactly synchronized with the orbits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".