New method can quickly derive contact binary parameters for large photometric surveys

There is a common envelope around the component stars of the contact system.

It can take several hours or days for the current methods to derive the parameters of contact binaries after thousands of light curves have been released.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Science and Technology of China have collaborated on a machine learning-based method to quickly get the parameters and errors of contact.

The journal published a study on this topic.

One model without the influence of the third light and one model with the influence of the third light were obtained by the researchers.

The error of the light curves generated by these two models is less than one thousandth of the magnitude, and the parameters and corresponding errors of the contact binaries can be quickly obtained. Compared with the traditional methods, this method not only meets the requirements in accuracy, but also improves the speed by four orders of magnitude.

It's possible to derive the parameters of a large number of contacts. The researchers will analyze the TESS survey data of the space telescope and the ZTF survey data of the ground telescope.

More information: Xu Ding et al, Fast Derivation of Contact Binary Parameters for Large Photometric Surveys, The Astronomical Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac8e66 Journal information: Astronomical Journal