VLA observations of the contact binary VW Cep

Radio observations of VW Cep at 2, 6, and 20 cm were made at regular intervals over three orbital periods. No emission was detected in the individual snapshots, each 11.5 min in length. Only a deep map obtained from the whole (concatenated) 6 cm data set shows a very weak source with the flux density 0.11 + or - 0.04 mJy. The source might be associated with the quiescent coronal emission of VW Cep; its brightness temperature is 5 x 10 to the 6th-5 x 10 to the 7th K, for dimensions 1-3 solar radii. Most likely it is not the thermal emission from the corona, because the estimated emission measured would be at least two orders of magnitude larger than that implied by the X-ray data. 33 references