Tables for the paper "A Simple Description of Light Curves of W UMa Systems", Slavek Rucinski (1993), PASP, 105, 1433


Read Me First

The tables are in plain unformatted ASCII.

The tabulation is as follows:
inclination 30 (2.5) 90 degr
mass-ratio 0.05 (0.05) 1.0
degree of contact 0 (0.5) 1

Note: All the calculations here are for the gravity brightening exponent equal to 1/3 of von Zeipel's (Teff ~ g0.32) at solar effective temperatures (5770 K) in V-band. The adopted bracketing atmospheres (5900 and 5660 K) were characterized by relative fluxes 1.093 and 0.909 and by the linear limb darkening coeffecients 0.57 and 0.61.
Separate (unpublished, available only here ) results for the radiative (von Zeipel) law at 32,000 K give very similar values of the Fourier coefficients which confirms that contact-binary light curves are dominated by geometrical rather than atmospheric effects.

There are two tables for solar-type W UMa systems:

coef 138276 bytes, 13 columns 7 characters wide
Each line contains the value of inclination (degr), mass-ratio, and eleven cosine coefficients a0 to a10 (in light units, not magnitudes!). There are three successive tables of the coeffecients for three values of the degree of contact: f=0 (inner), f=0.5, f=1 (outer).

depths of minima 43587 bytes, 4 columns 7 characters wide
Each line of the table contains the value of inclination (degr), mass-ratio, and the depth of both minima (in maximum light units), 1-l(00) and 1-l(1800), for eclipses of more- and less-massive components, respectively. Therefore, eg. to find the magnitude drop at the eclipse of the more massive component, do not use the depth tabulated here, but the light l(00), according to: m(0) = -2.5 log l(00). The division into three parts of the table, for the three values of the degree of contact, is the same as for "coef".

Note: A very good representation of a light curve can be usually obtained by calculating the Fourier series: l=Sum(ai*cos(2*pi*i*phase), and then truncating the curved part of the secondary (occultation) eclipse at the level l(1800) using the tables of the depth of secondary minima 1-l(1800)).