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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
The trajectories of wind particles emitted from the surface of a massive star in a close binary system are analyzed. Within a radius 1000 times the separation of the two stars, a significant fraction of the particle trajectories are found to cross the orbital plane, leading to the formation of a large-scale, outflowing circumbinary disk-like structure. The shocks which arise due to the collision of particles which are within crossing streamlines are expected to produce selected regions within the wind, particularly in the orbital plane, in which a higher degree of ionization prevails than in the wind in general. X-ray emission might also be expected from these regions. Such a model is suggested to be applicable to the erupting WR/LBV binary system HD 5980 and other binary LBV systems, during phases when wind velocities are slow.