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Illumination in binaries

J. -M. Hameury, H. Ritter

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/9610011

Abstract

We give a simple, but accurate method that can be used to account for illumination in compact binary systems which have a low-mass companion, even if spherically symmetric illumination of the secondary star (not necessarily on the main sequence) is not assumed. This is done by introducing a multiplicative factor Phi in the Stefan-Boltzmann surface boundary condition, which accounts for the blocking of the intrinsic secondary flux by X-ray heating of the photospheric layers. Numerical fits and tables for Phi are given for unperturbed effective temperatures in the range 2500 - 5600 K and log g in the range 1.0 - 5.0

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