New Techniques and Limitations of Light Curve Analysis

Abstract

The solution of light curves of eclipsing binaries provides the simplest way of measuring the basic physical parameters of stars. The development of computers and numerical methods enables us to perform an analysis of large amount of photometric data by comparing it to more and more sophisticated physical models which are also suitable for stellar systems with different peculiarities. Nevertheless, some parameters of stellar systems are poorly determined by light curves alone, and simultaneous fitting together with other data is preferable. The progress of instrumentation not only improves the precision and resolution of data, but also overcomes the classical gaps between stellar systems observable as visual, photometric and spectroscopic binaries. This opens new problems in the development of techniques of data analysis, which can be treated as a generalization of light curve modeling. Some of these directions are outlined here. In particular, the disentangling of spectra with line-profile variability due to proximity effects is discussed.