BINSYN: A Publicly Available Program for Simulating Spectra and Light Curves of Binary Systems with or without Accretion Disks

Abstract

The BINSYN program suite, a collection of programs for analysis of binary star systems with or without an optically thick accretion disk, is available for download from a wiki. This article describes the package, including download instructions. BINSYN produces synthetic spectra of individual binary star components plus a synthetic spectrum of the system. If the system includes an accretion disk, BINSYN also produces a separate synthetic spectrum of the disk face and rim. A system routine convolves the synthetic spectra with filter profiles of several photometric standards to produce absolute synthetic photometry output. The package generates synthetic light curves and determines an optimized solution for system parameters. This article includes illustrative literature references that have used the suite, including mass transfer rates in several cataclysmic binary systems.

Nova-Like Cataclysmic Variables in the Infrared

“…Thus, there appears to be no statistically significant correlation between orbital period and IR excess. This implies that the strength of the IR excess is not strongly linked to differences in mass transfer rate caused by secular evolution of the CVs (keeping in mind that the NLs generally have high mass transfer rates compared to other 27 Not to mention that the standard model predicts temperatures of 6000 K for the accretion disk rims of the NLs modeled in this work-consistent with disk rim temperatures found by other modeling work (Linnell et al 2007a(Linnell et al , 2008a(Linnell et al , 2008b(Linnell et al , 2010(Linnell et al , 2012-whereas the IR excess corresponds to much cooler thermal emission ( 1500 K). Cooler disk rim temperatures cannot be achieved within the constraint that the accretion disk must have a maximum radius no larger than the WD's Roche lobe (and, in fact, somewhat smaller still due to tidal truncation of the disk-see the review in Section 2.5.5 of Warner 2003 and references therein).…”

“…They are more than an order of magnitude brighter than the extrapolation of the V592 Cas SED model, which gives a total predicted system flux density at 70 μm of < 0.1 mJy (dominated by the CBD component). Linnell et al (2007a) calculated a model fit to the UV-optical SED of IX Vel with the BINSYN multi-component model atmosphere/synthetic spectrum code (Linnell & Hubeny 1996;Linnell et al 2008bLinnell et al , 2012. We utilize their system parameters as starting points (see Table 5) to construct our IR SED model.…”

Spectral modelling of massive binary systems

“…This new version of our CoMBiSpeC (code of massive binary spectral computation) model now allows spectral computation of (almost) any massive binary system. A&A 552, A39 (2013) Non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) spectral model grids (TLUSTY, Lanz & Hubeny 2003 are used to compute the integrated spectrum of the star at each orbital phase (see also, e.g., Hubeny 1994 andLinnell et al 2012). Because our spectra are synthetic, they are free of observational noise.…”

Binary Star Synthetic Photometry and Distance Determination Using Binsyn

“…A recent paper (Linnell et al 2012) announced the public availability of the BINSYN program suite 4 ; users should consult that paper and the Users Guide, available from the wiki, for a complete description of the program details.…”