Spectroscopic Detection of the Pre-White Dwarf Companion of Regulus

Mass transfer in an interacting binary will often strip the mass donor of its entire envelope and spin up the mass gainer to near critical rotation. The nearby B-type star Regulus represents a binary in the post-mass transfer stage: it is a rapid rotator with a very faint companion in a 40 days orbit. Here we present the results of a search for the spectral features of the stripped-down star in an extensive set of spectra with high signal-to-noise ratio and high resolution obtained with the CFHT/ESPaDOnS and TBL/NARVAL spectrographs. We first determine revised orbital elements in order to set accurate estimates of the orbital Doppler shifts at the times of observation. We then calculate cross-correlation functions of the observed and model spectra, and we search for evidence of the companion signal in the residuals after removal of the strong primary component. We detect a weak peak in the co-added residuals that has the properties expected for a faint pre-white dwarf. We use the dependence of the peak height and width on assumed secondary velocity semiamplitude to derive the semiamplitude, which yields masses of M1/M⊙ = 3.7 ± 1.4 and M2/M⊙ = 0.31 ± 0.10 (assuming orbital inclination equals the spin inclination of Regulus). We estimate the temperature of the pre-white dwarf Teff = (20 ± 4) kK through tests with differing temperature model spectra, and we find the radius R2/R⊙ = 0.061 ± 0.011 from the component temperatures and the flux ratio associated with the amplitude of the signal in the cross-correlation residuals.