A HYPOTHESIS ADVANCED TO EXPLAIN THE OVERLUMINOUS NATURE OF THE SECONDARY COMPONENTS IN SOME BINARIES Fesenkov, 1 Mrs. Masevich, 2 and their associates have advanced the idea that stars eject corpuscles as well as emit radiation. Their main purpose is to give a theoretical interpretation of the main sequence. Observationally, the discrepancy between the rate of mass loss of ß Lyrae derived from dynamical and from spectroscopic considerations has led Struve to suggest that this star loses mass

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... rtly through corpuscular radiation. 3 Following this suggestion, we have proposed 4 the ejection of high-energy particles from stars in order to explain the deviation from the mass-luminosity relation of the secondary components of some double-lined spectroscopic binaries: the overluminous nature of the secondary components of these binaries is due to heating by corpuscular radiation from the primary star. In proposing this hypothesis, we were guided mainly by the existence of solar corpuscular radiation. Indeed, we may regard the heating of the secondary's atmosphere by corpuscular radiation from the primary star and the excitation of the earth's atmosphere during auroral displays by solar corpuscular radiation as two parallel events, differing only in degree but not in principle. While the result of our investigation provides some empirical support to the theory proposed by Fesenkov and Mrs. Masevich for the evolution of stars along the main sequence through continuous ejection of matter, our hypothesis does not necessarily imply acceptance of their theory. We have further applied the idea of corpuscular heating to explain the overluminous nature of the subgiant (secondary)