Detached eclipsing binaries from the Kepler field: radii and photometric masses of components in short-period systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT The characterization of detached eclipsing binaries with low-mass components has become important when verifying the role of convection in stellar evolutionary models, which requires model-independent measurements of stellar parameters with great precision. However, spectroscopic characterization depends on single-target radial velocity observations and only a few tens of well-studied low-mass systems have been diagnosed in this way. We characterize eclipsing detached systems from the Kepler field with low-mass components by adopting a purely photometric method. Based on an extensive multicolour data set, we derive effective temperatures and photometric masses of individual components using clustering techniques. We also estimate the stellar radii from additional modelling of the available Kepler light curves. Our measurements confirm the presence of an inflation trend in the mass–radius diagram against theoretical stellar models in the low-mass regime.