The Strange Behaviour of GZ Puppis

Presenter(s): Tom Richards

Affiliation(s): FRAS, MASA, HonMRASNZ

Session details: Saturday, 2020-04-11 03:30:00, STAR

Abstract

GZ Pup is a short-period (8-hour) totally eclipsing binary I have been studying since 2014, and otherwise studied only once since discovery in 1956. An analysis of my data together with patrol data from ASAS-3 and INTEGRAL-OMC, and an earlier period analysis by Pilecki et al (2007); shows three anomalies or puzzles I will discuss: (1) period analysis of all data gives irreconcilable results; (2) the light curve at totality has a sloping floor, not horizontal; and (3) one maximum is sometimes higher than the other, sometimes lower.

Biography

Dr Tom Richards MA (VUW), DPhil (Oxon) was a mathematical logician, ending up academically as a computer science professor and founding a very successful software research and development company. Retiring from all that he returned to variable stars, in particular eclipsing binaries. In 2009 he was appointed Director of the Variable Star Section of the RASNZ, to revive it as Variable Stars South. Tom was awarded the Murray Geddes Prize of the Royal Astronomical Society of NZ in 1959 and the Berenice Page Medal of the Astronomical Society of Australia in 2006, for his research work as an amateur astronomer. He is a past president of the Astronomical Society of Victoria.