Related papers: Binaries as Astrophysical Laboratories: Open Quest…
Several concepts have been brought forward to determine where terrestrial planets are likely to remain habitable in multi-stellar environments. Isophote-based habitable zones, for instance, rely on insolation geometry to predict…
After several years of intensive technological development Virtual Observatory resources have reached a level of maturity sufficient for their routine scientific exploitation. The Virtual Observatory is starting to be used by astronomers in…
Binarity has been hypothesised to play an important, if not ubiquitous, role in the formation of planetary nebulae (PNe). Yet there remains a severe paucity of known binary central stars required to test the binary hypothesis and to place…
Stellar fundamental properties (masses, radii, effective temperatures) can be extracted from observations of eclipsing binary systems with remarkable precision, often better than 2%. Such precise measurements afford us the opportunity to…
Multiple systems play an important role in the evolution of star clusters. First we discuss several formation mechanisms which depend on the presence of binaries, either primordial or of dynamical origin. Hierarchical configurations are…
The formation and evolution of binary stars is a critical component of several fields in astronomy. The most numerous sources for gravitational wave observatories are inspiraling and/or merging compact binaries, while binary stars are…
We use analytical and N-body methods to examine the survival of wide stellar binaries against repeated encounters with dark substructures orbiting in the dark matter haloes of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). Our models adopt…
This paper will review the status of our observations and understanding of Be stars in X-ray binary systems. In virtually all cases the binary partner to the Be star is a neutron star. The circumstellar disk provides the accretion fuel and…
Which sample of objects can give strong constraints on single-star evolution theory ? Whilst star cluster members share the same age and the same metallicity, many questions (e.g. field stars contamination, stellar rotation, presence of…
Over the past decade, microlensing has developed into a powerful tool to study stellar astrophysics, especially stellar atmospheres, stellar masses, and binarity. I review this progress. Stellar atmospheres can be probed whenever the source…
Situation with highly magnetized neutron stars in binary systems is not yet certain. On the one hand, all best studied magnetars seem to be isolated objects. On the other, there are many claims based on model-dependent analysis of spin…
Circumbinary planets (CBPs) are planets that orbit around both stars of a binary system. This chapter traces the history of research on CBPs and provides an overview over the current knowledge about CBPs and their detection methods. After…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will provide the largest observational sample of (interacting) double white dwarf binaries, whose evolution is driven by radiation reaction and other effects, such as tides and mass transfer. We…
Massive stars are inherently extreme objects, in terms of radiation, mass loss, rotation, and sometimes also magnetic fields. Concentrating on a (personally biased) subset of processes related to pulsations, rapid rotation and its interplay…
The orbital period is a measure of the size of a contact binary star, and can be combined with color to predict its luminosity to a fraction of stellar magnitude. This novel application of contact binary systems currently has limitations…
There are only a few sources that are definitely known to be gamma-ray binaries. Two of these are listed as associations in the Fermi LAT Bright Source List. We are developing novel techniques to extract high signal-to-noise light curves of…
To determine the parameters (masses, orbital period) of a binary, one requires among others the inclination, which is best determined from a visual orbit. The next generation of interferometers can provide visual orbits for a large number…
Searches for planets in close binary systems explore the degree to which stellar multiplicity inhibits or promotes planet formation. There is a degeneracy between planet formation models when only systems with single stars are…
Close binary stars are binary stars where the component stars are close enough such that they can exchange mass and/or energy. They are subdivided into semi-detached, overcontact or ellipsoidal binary stars. A challenging problem in the…
Contact binaries can be used for distance determinations of stellar systems. They are easy to discover and identify and are very abundant among solar-type stars, particularly for M_V > +3. The period - luminosity - colour (PLC) relations…