HD 120678: a classical Be star with a tilting heartbeat disk

Abstract

Classical Oe/Be/Ae stars possess Keplerian circum-equatorial decretion disks which produce not just the eponymous emission lines but also the bewildering diversity of photometric variations on timescales above a few days. The variability is due to varying amounts and geometric distributions of the circumstellar gas. The ASAS-3 V-band light curve of HD 120678 between March 2005 and November 2008 resembled an inverse P Cygni profile, which may have been a one-off event. The peak-to-valley amplitude reached ~0.9 mag. Before and after this photometric event, the Balmer emission lines and their variability matched those of classical Be stars with an intermediate to low inclination angle. At the sharp minimum of the light curve, Gamen et al. (2012) observed shell-type profiles implying an edge-on (high-inclination) view. For the historical activity phases of gamma Cas and 59 Cyg, such a Be => Be-shell => Be sequence has been successfully interpreted as rotations of the disk plane. HD 120678 and a few other Be stars add a not previously recognized phenomenon to the plethora of Be-star variabilities, namely heartbeat light curves. Analogously to the distortion of heartbeat stars, the variability is due to heartbeat disks gravitationally tilted by an additional star as modeled by Marr et al. (2022) for Pleione. While the typical amplitudes of heartbeat stars are only a few 0.01 mag, heartbeat disks can explain the ten times larger amplitudes observed in Be stars.