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Up: The optical

5. Summary

The main result of our survey is the identification of 8 contact binaries which are likely members of 47 Tuc and 2 detached/semidetached binaries which are possible blue stragglers. Particularly interesting is the bright binary OGLEGC228. By combining radial velocity curves with photometry one would be able to determine an accurate distance to this system. That would in turn give distance to the cluster if the binary is indeed member of 47 Tuc. We failed to identify any detached eclipsing systems among cluster turnoff stars. Three such systems with periods ranging from 1.5 to 4.6 day were identified in our survey of tex2html_wrap_inline1295 Cen (Papers I and II).

We identified 6 variables which are likely to be red giants belonging to the cluster. These stars exhibit modulation of luminosity with periods ranging from 2 to 36 days and full amplitudes in the V band ranging from 0.08 to 0.18 mag. They may represent high-amplitude counterparts of low-amplitude variable K giants identified in the central region of 47 Tuc by Edmonds & Gilliliand (1996).

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by NSF grants AST-9530478 and AST-9528096 to Bohdan Paczynski. JK was supported also by the Polish KBN grant 2P03D-011-12. We are indebted to Kyle Cudworth for sending us the astrometric data on 47 Tuc. We thank Ian Thompson for his detailed remarks on the draft version of this paper.



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