Eclipsing Binaries in the OGLE Variable Star Catalog.II. Light Curves of the W UMa-type Systems in Baade's Window

Light curves of the contact systems visible in the direction of Baade's Window have been analyzed using the first coefficients of the Fourier representation. The results confirm that the geometric contact between components is usually weak. Systems showing significant differences in the depths of eclipses are very rare in the volume-limited sample to 3 kpc: only 2 among 98 contact systems show the difference larger than 0.065 mag; for most systems the difference is <0.04 mag. If this relative frequency of 1/50 is representative, then one among 12,500 - 15,000 Main Sequence F-K spectral-type stars is either a semi-detached or poor-thermal-contact system. Below the orbital period of 0.37 day, no systems with appreciable differences in the eclipse depths have been discovered. Since large depth differences are expected to be associated with the "broken-contact" phase of the Thermal Relaxation Oscillations, this phase must be very short for orbital periods above 0.37 day and possibly entirely absent for shorter periods. In the full sample, which is dominated by intrinsically bright, distant, long-period systems, larger eclipse-depth differences are more common with about 9% of binaries showing this effect. Sizes of these differences correlate with the sense of light-curve asymmetries (differing heights of maxima) for systems with orbital periods longer than 0.4 day suggesting an admixture of semi-detached systems with accretion hot spots on cooler components. The light-curve amplitudes in the full sample as well as in its volume-limited sub-sample are surprisingly small and strongly suggest a mass-ratio distribution steeply rising toward more dissimilar components. Many low mass-ratio systems remain to be discovered in the sky field.Comment: latex 14 pages of text and 14 figures (aastex40 and psfig), submitted to AJ; the first paper astro-ph/9607009 will appear in AJ, Jan.199

Absolute-Magnitude Calibration for W~UMa-type Systems. II. Influence of Metallicity

A modification to the absolute magnitude calibration for W~UMa-type systems, taking into account differences in metal abundances, is derived on the basis of contact binary systems recently discovered in metal-poor clusters. A preliminary estimate of the magnitude of the metallicity-dependent term for the $(B-V)$-based calibration is $\Delta M_V = -(0.3 \pm 0.1) \times [Fe/H]$. The calibration based on the $(V-I_C)$ color is expected to be less sensitive with the correction term $\approx -(0.12\pm 0.05) \times [Fe/H]$.Comment: one PS file containing text and 5 figs, packed with uufile