Tidally Excited Oscillations in Heartbeat Binary Stars: Pulsation Phases and Mode Identification

Tidal forces in eccentric binary stars known as heartbeat stars excite detectable oscillations that shed light on the processes of tidal synchronization and circularization. We examine the pulsation phases of tidally excited oscillations (TEOs) in heartbeat binary systems. The target list includes four published heartbeat binaries and four additional systems observed by Kepler. To the first order, the pulsation phases of TEOs can be explained by the geometric effect of the dominant l = 2, m = 0, or ±2 modes assuming pulsations are adiabatic. We found that this simple theoretical interpretation can account for more than half of the systems on the list, assuming their spin and orbit axes are aligned. We do find significant deviations from the adiabatic predictions for some other systems, especially for the misaligned binary KIC 8164262. The deviations can potentially help to probe the nonadiabaticity of pulsation modes as well as resonances in the tidal forcing.