334 research outputs found
The Light and Period Variations of the Eclipsing Binary BX Draconis
New CCD photometric observations of BX Dra were obtained for 26 nights from
2009 April to 2010 June. The long-term photometric behaviors of the system are
presented from detailed studies of the period and light variations, based on
the historical data and our new observations. All available light curves
display total eclipses at secondary minima and inverse O'Connell effects with
Max I fainter than Max II, which are satisfactorily modeled by adding the
slightly time-varying hot spot on the primary star. A total of 87 times of
minimum light spanning over about 74 yrs, including our 22 timing measurements,
were used for ephemeris computations. Detailed analysis of the O-C diagram
showed that the orbital period has changed in combinations with an upward
parabola and a sinusoidal variation. The continuous period increase with a rate
of +5.65 \times 10^-7 d yr^-1 is consistent with that calculated from the
Wilson-Devinney synthesis code. It can be interpreted as a mass transfer from
the secondary to the primary star at a rate of 2.74 \times 10^-7 M\odot yr^-1,
which is one of the largest rates for contact systems. The most likely
explanation of the sinusoidal variation with a period of 30.2 yrs and a
semi-amplitude of 0.0062 d is a light-traveltime effect due to the existence of
a circumbinary object. We suggest that BX Dra is probably a triple system,
consisting of a primary star with a spectral type of F0, its secondary
component of spectral type F1-2, and an unseen circumbinary object with a
minimum mass of M3 = 0.23 M\odot.Comment: 24 pages, including 5 figures and 9 tables, accepted for publication
in PAS
Limits of Binaries That Can Be Characterized by Gravitational Microlensing
Due to the high efficiency of planet detections, current microlensing planet
searches focus on high-magnification events. High-magnification events are
sensitive to remote binary companions as well and thus a sample of
wide-separation binaries are expected to be collected as a byproduct. In this
paper, we show that characterizing binaries for a portion of this sample will
be difficult due to the degeneracy of the binary-lensing parameters. This
degeneracy arises because the perturbation induced by the binary companion is
well approximated by the Chang-Refsdal lensing for binaries with separations
greater than a certain limit. For binaries composed of equal mass lenses, we
find that the lens binarity can be noticed up to the separations of
times of the Einstein radius corresponding to the mass of each lens. Among
these binaries, however, we find that the lensing parameters can be determined
only for a portion of binaries with separations less than times of
the Einstein radius.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
Coexistence of WiFi and WiMAX Systems Based on PS-Request Protocolsâ
We introduce both the coexistence zone within the WiMAX frame structure and a PS-Request protocol for the coexistence of WiFi and WiMAX systems sharing a frequency band. Because we know that the PS-Request protocol has drawbacks, we propose a revised PS-Request protocol to improve the performance. Two PS-Request protocols are based on the time division operation (TDO) of WiFi system and WiMAX system to avoid the mutual interference, and use the vestigial power management (PwrMgt) bit within the Frame Control field of the frames transmitted by a WiFi AP. The performance of the revised PS-Request protocol is evaluated by computer simulation, and compared to those of the cases without a coexistence protocol and to the original PS-Request protocol
Microlensing Detections of Planets in Binary Stellar Systems
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary
stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary
systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other
binary star is located at a large distance, both planet and secondary companion
produce perturbations at a common region around the planet-hosting binary star
and thus the signatures of both planet and binary companion can be detected in
the light curves of high-magnification lensing events. We find that identifying
planets in binary systems is optimized when the secondary is located in a
certain range which depends on the type of the planet. The proposed method can
detect planets with masses down to one tenth of the Jupiter mass in binaries
with separations <~ 100 AU. These ranges of planet mass and binary separation
are not covered by other methods and thus microlensing would be able to make
the planetary binary sample richer.Comment: 5 pages, two figures in JPG forma
Microlensing Sensitivity to Earth-mass Planets in the Habitable Zone
Microlensing is one of the most powerful methods that can detect extrasolar
planets and a future space-based survey with a high monitoring frequency is
proposed to detect a large sample of Earth-mass planets. In this paper, we
examine the sensitivity of the future microlensing survey to Earth-mass planets
located in the habitable zone. For this, we estimate the fraction of Earth-mass
planets that will be located in the habitable zone of their parent stars by
carrying out detailed simulation of microlensing events based on standard
models of the physical and dynamic distributions and the mass function of
Galactic matter. From this investigation, we find that among the total
detectable Earth-mass planets from the survey, those located in the habitable
zone would comprise less than 1% even under a less-conservative definition of
the habitable zone. We find the main reason for the low sensitivity is that the
projected star-planet separation at which the microlensing planet detection
efficiency becomes maximum (lensing zone) is in most cases substantially larger
than the median value of the habitable zone. We find that the ratio of the
median radius of the habitable zone to the mean radius of the lensing zone is
roughly expressed as .Comment: ApJ, submitte
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