Spectroscopic Detection of the Pre-White Dwarf Companion of Regulus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Mass transfer in an interacting binary will often strip the mass donor of its entire envelope and spin up the mass gainer to near critical rotation. The nearby B-type star Regulus represents a binary in the post-mass transfer stage: it is a rapid rotator with a very faint companion in a 40 days orbit. Here we present the results of a search for the spectral features of the stripped-down star in an extensive set of spectra with high signal-to-noise ratio and high resolution obtained with the CFHT/ESPaDOnS and TBL/NARVAL spectrographs. We first determine revised orbital elements in order to set accurate estimates of the orbital Doppler shifts at the times of observation. We then calculate cross-correlation functions of the observed and model spectra, and we search for evidence of the companion signal in the residuals after removal of the strong primary component. We detect a weak peak in the co-added residuals that has the properties expected for a faint pre-white dwarf. We use the dependence of the peak height and width on assumed secondary velocity semiamplitude to derive the semiamplitude, which yields masses of M 1/M ⊙ = 3.7 ± 1.4 and M 2/M ⊙ = 0.31 ± 0.10 (assuming orbital inclination equals the spin inclination of Regulus). We estimate the temperature of the pre-white dwarf T eff = (20 ± 4) kK through tests with differing temperature model spectra, and we find the radius R 2/R ⊙ = 0.061 ± 0.011 from the component temperatures and the flux ratio associated with the amplitude of the signal in the cross-correlation residuals.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".