Detached eclipsing binary star science in the 2040s

Abstract

Detached eclipsing binary stars (DEBS) are currently the best source of accurate and precise fundamental stellar parameters. This makes DEBS crucial targets for constraining the impact of various physical processes on stellar structure and evolution. Long-period binaries are particularly interesting because their separation minimises interactions between the components. This makes long-period binaries more comparable to single stars. However, the current sample of DEBS with high precision stellar parameters are dominated by short-period systems (e.g. ~90% of the Gaia DR3 eclipsing binaries have periods < 5 days). Facilities capable of performing detailed studies of long-period DEBS will be essential to further improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Such facilities would need to be able to obtain spectroscopic observations of more distant objects at high resolution and cadence. 2-8m class telescopes with echelle spectrographs and an ability to monitor a large sample of stars would be required.