We continue to follow up the posts from the last two weeks (see here and here) and briefly discuss the eclipsing binary we talked about. But mostly this will be a ‘Do t yourself’ post where you can go and try this out.
I found a very basic online tool that allows you simulate a light curve for a binary based on some basic settings (mass, radius, temperature, separation, etc.). The tool can be found here.
In the above plot I made a quick attempt of getting a light curve that looks like the one we had. Very close in terms of period and a ratio of eclipse depth that looks like what we find in the data. Indeed, as suspected, one can model this using two stars of different temperatures.
Unfortunately the tool only does this for ‘white light’ i.e. the total flux over all wavelengths. Our data allows a much better analysis as we can investigate how things change with filter. Thus, if someone finds (or programs) an online tool where the light curves are shown in different filter, please let us know 🙂