Photometric study of fourteen low-mass binaries

TL;DR

This study presents new photometric data and analysis for fourteen low-mass eclipsing binaries, deriving their masses and radii, and compares these with existing data to assess the accuracy of purely photometric methods.

Contribution

The paper provides new mass and radius estimates for fourteen low-mass binaries using photometry alone, highlighting limitations of photometric methods without spectroscopy.

Findings

Derived masses and radii for 14 low-mass binaries.

Comparison shows photometry alone may lack precision for M-R relation testing.

All systems are short-period circular binaries, some with spots.

Abstract

New CCD photometric observations of fourteen short-period low-mass eclipsing binaries (LMB) in the photometric filters I, R and V were used for the light curve analysis. There still exists a discrepancy between radii as observed and those derived from the theoretical modelling for LMB in general. Mass calibration of all observed LMB was done using only the photometric indices. The light curve modelling of these selected systems were performed, yielding the new derived masses and radii for both components. We compared these systems with the compilation of other known double-lined LMB systems with uncertainties of masses and radii less then 5 \%, which includes 66 components of binaries where both spectroscopy and photometry were combined together. All of our systems are circular short-period binaries, and for some of them the photospheric spots were also used. A purely photometric study of the light curves without spectroscopy seems unable to achieve high enough precision and accuracy in the masses and radii to provide for a meaningful test of the M-R relation for low-mass stars.