Photometric Monitoring of Open Clusters I. The Survey

Abstract

Open clusters, which have age, abundance, and extinction information from studies of main-sequence turn off stars, are the ideal location in which to determine the mass-luminosity-radius relation for low-mass stars. We have undertaken a photometric monitoring survey of open clusters in the Galaxy designed to detect low-mass eclipsing binary systems through variations in their relative light curves. Our aim is to provide an improved calibration of the mass-luminosity-radius relation for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, to test stellar structure and evolution models, and to help quantify the contribution of low-mass stars to the global mass census in the Galaxy. In this paper we present our survey, describing the data and outlining the analysis techniques. We study six nearby open clusters, with a range of ages from $\sim 0.2$ to 4 Gyr and metallicities from approximately solar to -0.2dex. We monitor a field-of-view of > 1 square degree per target cluster, well beyond the characteristic cluster radius, over timescales of hours, days, and months with a sampling rate optimised for the detection of eclipsing binaries with periods of hours to days. Our survey depth is designed to detect eclipse events in a binary with a primary star of $\lesssim 0.3~M_{\sun}$. Our data have a photometric precision of $\sim 3$ mmag at $I\approx 16$.

50 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in AJ

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Monitor project: Searching for occultations in young open clusters
• Absolute dimensions of eclipsing binaries. XXIV. The Be star system DW Carinae, a member of the open cluster Collinder 228
• Primordial Binary Evolution and Blue Stragglers
• Planets in Stellar Clusters Extensive Search. IV. A detection of a possible transiting planet candidate in the open cluster NGC 2158
• Blue Straggler Stars in Galactic Open Clusters and the Simple Stellar Population Model
• Time-Series Ensemble Photometry and the Search for Variable Stars in the Open Cluster M11
• Modeling blue stragglers in young clusters