Ten neighboring harmonic pairs leave under two percent of an orbital-delay template for KIC 8164262

We test the known strong oscillation of KIC 8164262 as a clock for its binary orbit. We use 18 public Kepler release 25 quarters. After each quarter has its own polynomial baseline and carrier coefficients, ten free pairs of neighboring orbital harmonics leave 1.21 percent of the delay-template norm in corrected flux and 1.97 percent in aperture flux. The corrected-flux coefficient without these harmonics changes from 83.4 to 9.7 seconds when the periastron exclusion grows from two to five days. An added nonlinear delay with a 37.16-second scale is recovered as 37.158 seconds in the fixed-template test. A periodic delay produces sidebands at frequencies where extra tidal modes can occur. Thus, a one-mode clock test needs physical restrictions on those modes. We establish no orbital-delay detection, new companion, or new stellar mode. The errors are conditional on the template, baseline and noise blocks. Both flux products share observations. There is no independent telescope confirmation. The package contains code, accepted samples, exact source hashes, all results, checks, a figure, and reproduction instructions.

astronomy · Kepler · KIC 8164262 · phase modulation · tidal oscillations · identifiability