Binary Stars


My main research interests include the structure and evolution of close binary stars and modeling binary star observable data.

Since the early 1980s, I have collaborated with Bob Wilson on many of the Wilson-Devinney binary star modeling program updates.

The FTP site ftp://ftp.astro.ufl.edu/pub/wilson/lcdc2015 provides access to the most recent (2015) public version and documentation. A documentation booklet in PDF format is also available here.

Auxiliary data files needed to run the programs are accessible from the LCDC2015 and Limb Darkening pages on this site.

Andrej Prša’s binary star program Phoebe (Physics of Eclipsing Binaries) initially used  Wilson-Devinney as the underlying computational model.  The program has a user-friendly graphical interface.

Over-contact binary orbital motion
AW UMa model: a low-mass-ratio over-contact binary system.