Bolometric treatment of irradiation effects: general discussion and application to binary stars

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for modeling irradiation effects in binary star systems, focusing on heat redistribution processes, and demonstrates its implementation within the PHOEBE 2.1 software for eclipsing binary analysis.

Contribution

It presents a general mathematical and physical framework for bolometric irradiation effects, including three redistribution models, integrated into the PHOEBE software for binary star systems.

Findings

Framework effectively models heat redistribution in binary stars.

Implementation in PHOEBE enables practical analysis of irradiation effects.

Tests on toy models demonstrate the framework's applicability.

Abstract

A general framework for dealing with irradiation effects in the bolometric sense --- specifically, reflection with heat absorption and the consequent redistribution of the absorbed heat, for systems of astrophysical bodies where the boundaries are used as support for the description of the processes, is presented. Discussed are its mathematical and physical properties, as well as its implementation approximations, with a focus on three plausible redistribution processes (uniform, latitudinal, and local redistribution). These are tested by extending PHOEBE 2.1 ( http://phoebe-project.org ), the open-source package for modeling eclipsing binaries, and applied to a toy model of the known two-body eclipsing systems.