Work

The EBLM project – XVIII. 3D obliquities of five low-mass eclipsing binaries

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT The formation of tight stellar binaries remains an unsolved problem. There is too much angular momentum in a collapsing and fragmenting protostellar cloud to form a stellar binary in situ with a separation less than an AU, yet thousands of these short-period binaries have been discovered. One indication of a binary’s formation is the angle between the stellar spin and orbital axes – its obliquity. The classical method for determining projected stellar obliquities is the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect. This has been applied to 132 hot Jupiters, but only a handful of stellar binaries. Of the binary systems with measured projected obliquities, even fewer have measured 3D obliquities. In this paper, we add five more short-period binary 3D obliquity measurements to the sample previously consisting of one system. We present Rossiter–McLaughlin measurements for EBLM J0239-20, EBLM J0941-31, EBLM J1037-25, EBLM J1141-37, and EBLM J2025-45. These systems consist of an M-dwarf eclipsing an F/G-type primary. We combine CORALIE and HARPS spectroscopy with TESS photometry of primary and secondary eclipses. We show that even though the sky-projected obliquities seem to be aligned, there is modest but non-zero spin-orbit misalignment ($\psi$ between 5 and 20$^{\circ }$). Our primary stars straddle the Kraft break at $\sim 6250$ K. We derive the M-dwarf masses and radii to precisions better than 3 per cent. With the exception of EBLM J0941-31, each system has an inflated radius, exceeding stellar model predictions by more than 5$\sigma$.

Source: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag1334