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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
The recent discovery that the cool DA white dwarf L870-2 (EG11, WD0135-052) is a double-lined spectroscopic binary composed of a detached pair of DA white dwarfs (Saffer, Liebert, and Olszewski 1988, SLO hereafter) has raised some challenging problems for stellar evolution theories of such binary systems. One first important step in the understanding of this short-period system is to establish the atmospheric parameters of each component. SLO have argued from previous determinations of the effective temperature and absolute magnitude of the system, and also from their own study of the composite Hα profile, that the two components should be similar. We wish here to reexamine this assertion by taking a new look at the constraints on the two components brought about by the available observational data.