Faculty Sponsor

Todd Hillwig

College

College of Arts & Sciences (CAS)

Department/Program

Physics and Astronomy

ORCID Identifier(s)

0009-0003-8930-865X

Presentation Type

Poster Presentation

Symposium Date

Summer 7-23-2025

Abstract

Planetary nebulae occur towards the end of the life cycles of stars with a mass less than about eight times the mass of the Sun. As the star expands at the end of its life, it ejects its outer layers, and the high temperature of the leftover core causes the ejected gas to ionize and glow. At the centers of some of these planetary nebulae, there can be two stars present instead of one. These binary stars can be detected through a variety of ways, with the most common being photometric variability, or a change in the brightness of the system. For the system presented here, PHR J1040-5417, this was accomplished through observations of the system’s brightness as observed from Earth. This data can then be used to construct a light curve, or a plot of how the brightness changes over time, which can then be used to obtain the period of the binary. In this work, we will explain our process in determining the orbital period of PHR J1040-5417 to very high precision.

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