NEW ASTRONOMY, vol.12, no.5, pp.427-434, 2007 (SCI-Expanded)
We study the role of convection in the surface heat flow of low mass stellar envelopes with the aid of Paczynski's public domain program program GOB. This role is important, for example, for the analysis of light curves of close binary stars. We have considered atrnospheric models for a range of masses similar to the components of contact or near-contact binaries between 0.4 and 1.1 M-circle dot, and examined the effects of changing luminosity, surface temperature and mixing length for stars of given mass. Our presentation includes checks of the modeling against published standard stellar envelopes. A slight program modification allowed gravity darkening coefficients for selected models to be calculated directly.