How to obtain the orbital period of a system

[XaviP07-23]

As an astrophysics student, we're currently doing a research project on eclipsing binary systems and we'd like to gain a better understanding of the PHOEBE software. However, we're running into a problem when we try to put in our own light curves, the period is always equal to 1 when we use get_ephemeris, which is very compromising for plotting phase diagrams. We can't work out where the error comes from and whether we might be missing information on this subject. Is there a programme on the PHOEBE site that can give us the period from our light curve data?

[matthiasfabry]

Hello, thanks for your message.

It seems like you're struggling with finding the correct period of your light curves. When adding a dataset, PHOEBE does not automatically change any of the parameters of the bundle. If you have some prior information about the system, you can explicitly tell the bundle by using b.set_value('period', your_period) (see https://phoebe-project.org/docs/2.4/tutorials/general_concepts for manipulating parameters in the bundle). If not, you can use the lc_periodogram solver in PHOEBE to fit for the period. See https://phoebe-project.org/docs/2.4/tutorials/solver for the workflow on how to estimate/fit parameters from datasets.

[XaviP07-23]

Hello, your advice paid off and we managed to get the period for our binary system. We're very grateful! This enabled us to obtain the other fundamental parameters and to take a giant step forward in our research.