Bayesian spectral analysis of white dwarf light curves
by
Richard Arnold
Victoria University
Coauthors: Tony Vignaux, Denis Sullivan

White Dwarfs are stars near the end of their lives which may pulsate with periods of a few minutes, and which can be observed to brighten and dim as they pulsate. In this paper a Bayesian approach due to Bretthorst (1988) is applied to the analysis of the light curves of white dwarfs. The method yields estimates of the dominant pulsation frequencies which are highly accurate and superior to estimates obtained from classical Fourier techniques. Moreover, the method can be applied to datasets where there are missing values, where the sampling is not uniform in time, and in particular allows the combination of observations from different observing runs. In this paper we analyse observations of a particular white dwarf on 8 separate occasions over a two year period.

Date received: September 16, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caic-04.