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Session 22 - Binary Stars: New Generation Modeling Developments & Results.
Oral session, Tuesday, June 10
North Main Hall F/G,
We summarize and report recent improvements to a version of the Wilson-Devinney program. This program is widely used for the analysis of eclipsing binary data and is open to extensions and improvements. \tt WD95 is such an extension and contains our version of the Wilson-Devinney code. It supports the use of the Kurucz atmosphere models; it provides options to use multiple epoch data and multi-wavelength synoptic passbands. The WD95 program contains an improved I/O interface, simplex algorithms for initial searches and tests, and versions of Wilson-Devinney DC and LC programs and options to switch to automatic differential corrections or to a damped least-squares solver using normal equations that are modified as per Levenberg-Marquardt. The damped least-squares solver is tested with simulated data and used to demonstrate the features and performance of the code. The algorithm proves to be less dependent on the quality of guessed initial parameters and thus may be efficiently used to reduce the time involved in light curve analysis. This work has been supported by GKSS (Germany; to JK and EFM), NSERC (Canada), and URGC grants (Univ. of Calgary) (to EFM).
