Confirming Candidate Self-Lensing Binary Detections with Radial Velocity Measurements

Another new paper, this one led by Adam McMasyer, just went up on the arXiv:

Compact objects in approximately edge-on binary orbits with stars are able to produce a self-lensing effect, amplifying light from their companion once per orbit. To date, five white dwarf self-lensing systems are known, while none are known containing black holes or neutron stars. Discovery of such systems is a potential method of finding quiescent black holes and neutron stars, most of which will be pristine and unchanged from their formation. Photometric detections can suffer from degeneracies in the lens mass and orbital parameters when the amplification and crossing time are not well constrained, while photometric searches produce too many false positives to allow radial velocity investigation of every candidate. Therefore we investigate the minimal radial velocity (RV) observational requirements to characterise such systems by simulating detectable self-lensing light curves, using those light curves to generate targeted RV observations, and fitting RV jointly with photometry.

It has been submitted to RAS Techniques and Instruments and is currently undergoing peer review.