Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1996-11-20
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
latex 14 pages of text and 14 figures (aastex40 and psfig), submitted to AJ; the first paper astro-ph/9607009 will appear in A
Scientific paper
10.1086/118329
Light curves of the contact systems visible in the direction of Baade's Window have been analyzed using the first coefficients of the Fourier representation. The results confirm that the geometric contact between components is usually weak. Systems showing significant differences in the depths of eclipses are very rare in the volume-limited sample to 3 kpc: only 2 among 98 contact systems show the difference larger than 0.065 mag; for most systems the difference is <0.04 mag. If this relative frequency of 1/50 is representative, then one among 12,500 - 15,000 Main Sequence F-K spectral-type stars is either a semi-detached or poor-thermal-contact system. Below the orbital period of 0.37 day, no systems with appreciable differences in the eclipse depths have been discovered. Since large depth differences are expected to be associated with the "broken-contact" phase of the Thermal Relaxation Oscillations, this phase must be very short for orbital periods above 0.37 day and possibly entirely absent for shorter periods. In the full sample, which is dominated by intrinsically bright, distant, long-period systems, larger eclipse-depth differences are more common with about 9% of binaries showing this effect. Sizes of these differences correlate with the sense of light-curve asymmetries (differing heights of maxima) for systems with orbital periods longer than 0.4 day suggesting an admixture of semi-detached systems with accretion hot spots on cooler components. The light-curve amplitudes in the full sample as well as in its volume-limited sub-sample are surprisingly small and strongly suggest a mass-ratio distribution steeply rising toward more dissimilar components. Many low mass-ratio systems remain to be discovered in the sky field.
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