CONSTRAINING THE PROPERTIES OF DELTA SCUTI STARS USING SPECTROSCOPIC ECLIPSING BINARY SYSTEMS

Many stars exhibit stellar pulsations, favoring them for asteroseismic analyses. Interpreting the oscillations requires some knowledge of the oscillation mode geometry (spherical degree, radial, and azimuthal orders). The δ Scuti stars (1.5-2.5 M ☉) often show just one or few pulsation frequencies. Although this may promise a successful seismological analysis, we may not know enough about either the mode or the star to use the oscillation frequency to improve the determination of the stellar model or to probe the star's structure. For the observed frequencies to be used successfully as seismic probes of these objects, we need to concentrate on stars for which we can reduce the number of free parameters in the problem, such as binary systems or open clusters. We investigate how much our understanding of a δ Scuti star is improved when it is in a detached eclipsing binary system instead of being a single field star. We use singular value decomposition to explore the precision we expect in stellar parameters (mass, age, and chemical composition) for both cases. We examine how the parameter uncertainties propagate to the luminosity-effective temperature diagram and determine when the effort of obtaining a new measurement is justified. We show that for the single star, a correct identification of the oscillation mode is necessary to produce strong constraints on the stellar model properties, while for the binary system the observations without the pulsation mode provide the same or better constraints on the stellar parameters. In the latter case, the strong constraints provided by the binary system not only allow us to detect an incorrectly identified oscillation mode, but we can also constrain the oscillation mode geometry by comparing the distribution of possible solutions with and without including the oscillation frequency as a constraint.