Light Curve Analysis of Be Star Candidates in the Small Magellanic Cloud.pdfVIP

INTERPLAY BETWEEN PERIODIC, CYCLIC AND STOCHASTIC VARIABILITY IN SELECTED AREAS OF THE H-R DIAGRAM ASP Conference Series, Vol. XX, 2002 C. Sterken (ed.) Light Curve Analysis of Be Star Candidates in the Small Magellanic Cloud R.E. Mennickent, G. Pietrzynski, W. Gieren Departamento de F´ısica, Universidad de Concepci´on, Casilla 160-C, 2 0 Concepci´on, Chile. 0 2 Abstract. The recent discovery, based on a search of public OGLE p data, of Be star candidates in the Small Magellanic Cloud showing spec- e tacular photometric variations (Mennickent et al. 2002), has motivated S further analysis of their light curves. Here we report the results of a 3 statistical study of the light curves of Type-1, Type-2 and Type-3 stars. 1 Type-3 stars show a bimodal period distribution, with a main, broad 2 peak, between 20 and 130 days, and a narrower, secondary peak, be- v tween 140 and 210 days. We also find that, among Type-3 stars, the 7 maximum amplitude of oscillation correlates with the system luminosity, 8 in the sense that only low luminosity systems show large amplitude oscil- 1 9 lations. In general, the amplitude of these oscillations tends to increase 0 with the photometric period. A parametric study shows no correlation 2 between the amplitude, duration and asymmetry of Type-1 outbursts, 0