A ROSAT Survey of Contact Binary Stars
Abstract
Contact binary stars are common variable stars which are all believed to emit relatively large fluxes of x-rays. In this work we combine a large new sample of contact binary stars derived from the ROTSE-I telescope with x-ray data from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS) to estimate the x-ray volume emissivity of contact binary stars in the galaxy. We obtained x-ray fluxes for 140 contact binaries from the RASS, as well as 2 additional stars observed by the XMM-Newton observatory. From these data we confirm the emission of x-rays from all contact binary systems, with typical luminosities of approximately 1.0 x 10^30 erg s^-1. Combining calculated luminosities with an estimated contact binary space density, we find that contact binaries do not have strong enough x-ray emission to account for a significant portion of the galactic x-ray background.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0509820,
title = {A ROSAT Survey of Contact Binary Stars},
author = {M. T. Geske and S. J. Gettel and T. A. McKay},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0509820},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
19 pages, 5 figures, accepted by AJ