Accretion Disks and Long Cycles in β Lyrae-Type Binaries

Abstract

In order to inquire about the nature of the accretion disks formed around the more massive companion in binaries with β Lyrae-type light curves, we review literature presenting some physical and observational properties of these systems. In addition, we inspect the photometric time series of three representative eclipsing systems obtained by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) project during the last decades and compare them with β Lyrae. All these three systems show indications of being semidetached with a more massive B-type component and in a mass transfer stage. They also show long photometric cycles, and two of them show changes in the orbital light curve that can be interpreted in terms of structural changes of the accretion disks, eventually driven by variations in the mass transfer rate.

Cyclic changes in the interacting binary RX Cassiopeiae

“…We compared these infrared colors with those of double periodic variables (DPVs) and Be stars. The DPVs are close binaries that mostly consist of a B-type hotter star surrounded by an accretion disk fed by Roche-lobe overflow and mass transfer from a cooler giant companion (Mennickent 2017(Mennickent , 2022. Be stars are rapidly rotating B-type stars surrounded by a cir-cumstellar disk.…”

Photometric and Spectroscopic Analysis of V583 Lyrae, an Algol with a g-mode Pulsating Primary and Accretion Disk

“…These are intermediate-period systems studied by Peters & Polidan (1998), Richards & Albright (1999), and references therein. An accretion disk may exist in β Lyrae-type (Mennickent 2022) and long-period Algol-type binary stars (Dervişoǧlu et al 2010). The disk precession (Larwood et al 1996;Doğan et al 2015) may cause periodic flux variations as the disk area projected in the direction of the observer's line of sight changes, which may be a compelling explanation for the longperiod variation in some double-period variables (e.g., AU Mon; Lorenzi 1980;Djurašević et al 2010).…”