Summary
A multi-year photometric program on long-period eclipsing binaries has begun to uncover some properties of accretion disks in these systems. Emission and transmission properties can sometimes be found from light curve features produced by partial eclipses of the disk by the cool star, and by partial occultations of the cool star by the disk. These disks do not have the classical alpha structure. They are optically thin normal to the orbital plane, but may be geometrically thicker than purely gravitationally-stratified disks. Disk gas may be contaminated by dust particles acquired from the outer layers of the cool loser. In some systems, ‘high’ states, produced by elevated mass accretion by the hot star, occur, suggesting that the mass distribution in the disk is clumpy. However mass-transfer rates are found, they lie between 10-7 and 10-6 solar masses per year.
While this binary sample is small at the moment, some of its properties are shared with other systems. The author has five-color observations of about a dozen additional systems, which may fill out this picture more fully.
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Olson, E.C. Photometric effects of accretion disks in long-period eclipsing binaries. Space Sci Rev 50, 23–34 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00215916
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00215916