ST Aqr: Photometric and orbital period analysis of a near-contact binary with a secularly decreasing period — E8 Intelligence Research

Near contact binary (NCB) systems are astrophysically quite interesting; the light curve (LC) of ST Aqr, a member of this class, was obtained from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) database and analyzed in detail in this article. A q-search was undertaken to determine the mass ratio (q=M2/M1) for ST Aqr, and the q was found to be 0.472 ± 0.009. It was showed that each body in the ST Aqr system is a NCB with a filling factor of approximately 99 percent. As accurate absolute parameters are essential for investigating the evolutionary properties of such systems, the body masses of ST Aqr were estimated as M1 Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com