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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
It has been demonstrated (Zahn 1966 a, b, c; 1975, 1977) that turbulent viscous dissipation of tides can brake the rotation of stars having convective envelopes, while radiative dissipation can do like-wise for those having radiative envelopes. The time scales for the former are very small whereas those for the latter depend sensitively on the ratio r/R where r is the radius of the star and R, the binary separation. For most systems these turn out to be much less than their main sequence lifetimes. This fact affords a natural explanation for the preponderance of synchronous systems.