Today’s paper looks at this phenomenon with a telescope that is normally associated with exoplanets—Kepler. In order to fully understand the chaotic nature of RR Lyrae stars, the authors needed a long, continuous data set and an aperture capable of capturing the full light curve of the stars in question. Kepler is great at the former, but it is designed to search for small dips of light to detect exoplanets. Because of this, the “optimal” apertures used to detect exoplanets cut out a small fraction of the host star’s light. Removing RR Lyrae light, however, would lead to an inaccurate light curve. To complete this study, the authors created larger, specialized aperture masks to capture the full light curve of the RR Lyrae stars.
Read the full paper summary on Astrobites