Observations of Eclipsing Binary EPIC 201826968

Abstract

The eclipsing binary system EPIC 201826968 was imaged using the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network with Bessel-B, Bessel-V, SDSS-r0 and SDSS-i0 filters. AstroImageJ was used to determine the optimal exposure time for the images. We coded a phase-dispersion minimization (PDM) algorithm and compared its result to PyAstronomy’s PDM algorithm and both PyAstronomy’s and Astropy’s Lomb-Scargle algorithms. Our distance PDM algorithm gave a period of 0.3617673 days, while the PyAstronomy PDM gave 0.3617724 days. The Lomb-Scargle algorithms both gave very different periods of near 1.83 days, possibly due to Lomb-Scargle’s reliance on a sinusoidal fit. Since Kepler measured a period of 0.3617589 days, and the average period from the Python-coded and PyAstronomy PDM algorithms deviated from it by less than a second, we concluded that the period of eclipsing binary system EPIC 201826968 has
not changed since Kepler’s observations.