COBAIN: generalized 3D radiative transfer code for contact binary atmospheres

Abstract

Contact binary stars have been known to have a peculiar and somewhat mysterious hydro- and thermodynamical structure since their discovery, which directly affects the radiation distribution in their atmospheres. Over the past several decades, however, observational data of contact binaries have been modeled through a simplified approach, involving the artificial concatenation of the two components of the contact envelope and populating their respective surfaces with either blackbody atmospheres or plane-parallel model atmospheres of single stars. We show the implications this approach has on the reliability of the system parameter values and propose a method to overcome these issues with a new generalized radiative transfer code, COBAIN (COntact Binary Atmospheres with INterpolation). The basic principles of COBAIN are outlined and their application to different geometries and polytropic stellar structures is discussed. We present initial tests on single non-rotating, uniformly rotating and differentially rotating stars, as well as on simplified polytropic structural models of contact binaries. We briefly discuss the final goal of this ambitious project, which is the computation of model atmosphere tables under the correct assumptions for contact binary stars, to be used in modern binary star analysis codes.