El problema de la determinación de las masas en sistemas Algol

Abstract

One of the methods that are used to determine the mass of the fainter component in Algol systems is based on the assumption that such a component exactly fills the corresponding lobe of the first critical equipotentiai surface. Numerically it is shown, for instance, that for a variation of 10% in the radius of the star the mass of the primary component changes by about 90% while the mass of the secondary component changes by about 50%. The variation in the masses comes out directly proportional to the variation in the radius of the secondary component. As a consequence, the method is not adequate and may yield wrong conclusions in regard to the system.