Astronomical Cardiology: A Search For Heartbeat Stars Using \(\textit{Gaia}\) and \(\textit{TESS}\)

Heartbeat stars are a subclass of binary stars with short periods, high eccentricities, and phase-folded light curves that resemble an electrocardiogram. We start from the \(\textit{Gaia}\) catalogs of spectroscopic binaries and use \(\textit{TESS}\) photometry to identify 112 new heartbeat star systems. We fit their phase-folded light curves with an analytic model to measure their orbital periods, eccentricities, inclinations, and arguments of periastron. We then compare these orbital parameters to the \(\textit{Gaia}\) spectroscopic orbital solution. Our periods and eccentricities are consistent with the \(\textit{Gaia}\) solutions for 85\(\%\) of the single-line spectroscopic binaries but only 20\(\%\) of the double-line spectroscopic binaries. For the two double-line spectroscopic binary heartbeat stars with consistent orbits, we combine the \(\textit{TESS}\) phase-folded light curve and the \(\textit{Gaia}\) velocity semi-amplitudes to measure the stellar masses and radii with \(\texttt{PHOEBE}\). In a statistical analysis of the HB population, we find that non-giant heartbeat stars have evolved off the main sequence and that their fractional abundance rises rapidly with effective temperature.