Gas stream in Algol

Additional absorption features in the red wings of the resonance Mgii lines near 2800 Å are found in the observations of Algol made by Chen and Wood (1976) from theCopernicus satellite. The absorption features were clearly seen only during a part of the primary eclipse, in the phase interval 0.90–0.03.The observations are interpreted as produced by a stream of matter flowing from Algol B in the direction of Algol A. The measured Doppler shifts of the features give the value of 150 km s^–1 as the characteristic velocity of matter in the stream. The mass transfer connected with the stream is estimated to be of the order of 10^–13 M yr^–1.