Using Campaign 15 data from the K2 mission, we have discovered a triply-
eclipsing triple star system: EPIC 249432662. The inner eclipsing binary
system has a period of 8.23 days, with shallow ~3% eclipses. During the
entire 80-day campaign, there is also a single eclipse event of a third-body
in the system that reaches a depth of nearly 50% and has a total duration of
1.7 days, longer than for any previously known third-body eclipse involving
unevolved stars. The binary eclipses exhibit clear eclipse timing variations.
A combination of photodynamical modeling of the lightcurve, as well as seven
follow-up radial velocity measurements, has led to a prediction of the
subsequent eclipses of the third star with a period of 188 days. A campaign
of follow-up ground-based photometry was able to capture the subsequent pair
of third-body events as well as two further 8-day eclipses.
All of these observations made this unique object to be an ideal first case-
study for our new complex photo-spectro-dynamical software package which was
developed in the last three years. In this talk I will discuss the significance
of detailed studies of hierarchical triple systems and, present our new
results on the newly discovered, extremely flat, compact hierarchical triple
system EPIC 249432662.
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