A Method of Rapidly Deriving Late-type Contact Binary Parameters and Its Application in the Catalina Sky Survey

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural network-based method combined with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo to rapidly derive parameters of late-type contact binary systems from large sky survey data, significantly improving efficiency.

Contribution

The study develops a novel NNHMC method that accelerates parameter derivation for contact binaries, enabling analysis of large datasets from sky surveys.

Findings

Derived 19,104 binary parameters from Catalina Sky Survey

Achieved high consistency with previous studies for 30 binaries

Demonstrated the method's efficiency for large-scale surveys

Abstract

With the continuous development of large optical surveys, a large number of light curves of late-type contact binary systems (CBs) have been released. Deriving parameters for CBs using the the WD program and the PHOEBE program poses a challenge. Therefore, this study developed a method for rapidly deriving light curves based on the Neural Networks (NN) model combined with the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm (NNHMC). The neural network was employed to establish the mapping relationship between the parameters and the pregenerated light curves by the PHOEBE program, and the HMC algorithm was used to obtain the posterior distribution of the parameters. The NNHMC method was applied to a large contact binary sample from the Catalina Sky Survey, and a total of 19,104 late-type contact binary parameters were derived. Among them, 5172 have an inclination greater than 70 deg and a temperature difference less than 400 K. The obtained results were compared with the previous studies for 30 CBs, and there was an essentially consistent goodness-of-fit (R2) distribution between them. The NNHMC method possesses the capability to simultaneously derive parameters for a vast number of targets. Furthermore, it can provide an extremely efficient tool for rapid derivation of parameters in future sky surveys involving large samples of CBs.