In the last day or two, Adrian Price-Whelan matched up our radial-velocity binary sample from APOGEE DR16 to NASA Kepler and TESS data. We had been inspired by asteroseismic science, so we were looking at short-period binaries. But: Oh. My. Goodness.
Every single binary below some period shows interesting time-domain behavior in its photometry! It shows ellipsoidal variations, or transits, or “heartbeat” oscillations, or tidally locked rotation. There is so much science in these light curves. And although many of the sources we find have been found previously by either Kepler/TESS teams or else APOGEE teams, we are sensitive to many “sub-threshold” variabilities at low amplitude, because low amplitude in the photometry, at short periods, does not necessarily translate into low amplitude in radial velocity. Now: What to do with all this? Launch on a big, comprehensive project, or many small, focused ones?
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