Two Candidate KH 15D–like Systems from the Zwicky Transient Facility

Creators: Zhu, Wei; Bernhard, Klaus; Dai, Fei; Fang, Min; Zanazzi, J. J.; Zang, Weicheng; Dong, Subo; Hambsch, Franz-Josef; Gan, Tianjun; Wu, Zexuan; Poon, Michael

Abstract

KH 15D contains a circumbinary disk that is tilted relative to the orbital plane of the central binary. The precession of the disk and the orbital motion of the binary together produce rich phenomena in the photometric light curve. In this work, we present the discovery and preliminary analysis of two objects that resemble the key features of KH 15D from the Zwicky Transient Facility. These new objects, Bernhard-1 and Bernhard-2, show large-amplitude ( >1.5 mag), long-duration (more than tens of days), and periodic dimming events. A one-sided screen model is developed to model the photometric behavior of these objects, the physical interpretation of which is a tilted, warped circumbinary disk occulting the inner binary. Changes in the object light curves suggest potential precession periods over timescales longer than 10 yr. Additional photometric and spectroscopic observations are encouraged to better understand the nature of these interesting systems.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2022 May 31; revised 2022 June 18; accepted 2022 June 20; published 2022 July 4. We thank Richard Post for contributing to the photometric observations of Bernhard-2 and Greg Herczeg for useful discussion. We also thank the anonymous referee for comments and suggestions on the manuscript. W. Zhu, W. Zang, and T.G. acknowledge support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 12133005). W. Zhu and S.D. are supported by the science research grant from the China Manned Space Project No. CMS-CSST-2021-B12. W. Zhu is also supported by the National Science Foundation of China (grant No. 12173021). J.Z. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the funding reference # CITA 490888-16. This research uses data obtained through the Telescope Access Program (TAP), which has been funded by the TAP member institutes. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum, Northwestern University and former partners the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratories, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.

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