Influence of interstellar and atmospheric extinction on light curves of eclipsing binaries
Abstract
Interstellar and atmospheric extinctions redden the observational photometric data and they should be handled rigorously. This paper simulates the effect of reddening for the modest case of two main sequence T1 = 6500K and T2 = 5500K components of a detached eclipsing binary system. It is shown that simply subtracting a constant from measured magnitudes (the approach often used in the field of eclipsing binaries) to account for reddening should be avoided. Simplified treatment of the reddening introduces systematics that reaches \~0.01mag for the simulated case, but can be as high as ~0.2mag for e.g. B8V--K4III systems. With rigorous treatment, it is possible to uniquely determine the color excess value E(B-V) from multi-color photometric light curves of eclipsing binaries.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0405314,
title = {Influence of interstellar and atmospheric extinction on light curves of eclipsing binaries},
author = {A. Prsa and T. Zwitter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0405314},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
6 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, Kopal's Binary Star Legacy conference contribution (Litomysl 2004), to be published by Kluwer A&SS