Constraining RRc candidates using SDSS colours

Abstract

The light variations of first-overtone RR Lyrae stars and contact eclipsing binaries can be difficult to distinguish. The Catalina Periodic Variable Star catalog contains several misclassified objects, despite the classification efforts by Drake et al. (2014). They used metallicity and surface gravity derived from spectroscopic data (from the SDSS database) to rule out binaries. Our aim is to further constrain the catalog using SDSS colours to estimate physical parameters for stars that did not have spectroscopic data.

2 pages, 1 figure, proceedings of the RRL2015 - High-Precision Studies of RR Lyrae Stars conference, to appear in the Communications from the Konkoly Observatory