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Session 78 - Stars - Young and Old, Large and Small.
Display session, Wednesday, January 15
Metropolitan Ballroom,
Close visual binaries with established photometry were found to be precision probes (Corbally 1984) of the Revised Yale Isochrones. It is now opportune to test new isochrones in a similar way. These include the Bertelli et al. (1994) Isochrones and the Yale Isochrones 1996 (Demarque et al.1996). Their sets of solar metallicity isochrones are compared with the color-magnitude data of 56 visual binaries (Hurly amp; Warner 1983, Rakos et al.1982), whose reliability has been established by spectroscopy of each binary component from the University of Toronto's Southern Observatory telescope (Corbally 1984). Quantitative values for the goodness-of-fit between the isochrones and the binaries, 30 of which have evolved components, show that the modelling of stellar evolution has significantly improved in the last decade or so.
