dwarf nova tagged posts

Almost 35 years ago, scientists made the then-radical proposal that colossal hydrogen bombs called novae go through a very long-term life cycle after erupting, fading to obscurity for hundreds of thousands of years and then building back up to become full-fledged novae once more. A new study is the first to fully model the work and incorporate all of the feedback factors now known to control these systems, backing up the original prediction while bringing new details to light. Published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy, the study confirms that the novae we observe flashing throughout the universe represent just a few percent of these cataclysmic variables, as they are known, with the rest “hiding” in hibernation.

“We’ve now quantified the suggest...

Mu Centauri. Credit: Palomar Observatory/STScI/WikiSky

510 light years away, Mu Centauri is a very interesting dwarf nova, a close binary star system in which white dwarf accretes matter from its companion. Although little is know about Mu Centauri, we could observe temporal variations of its brightness and its flickering on a relatively low level. It was also found that this system’s light curve contains odd consistent modulations on 2 different periods.

Bruch used 0.6-m Zeiss and the 0.6-m Boller & Chivens telescopes of Observatorio do Pico dos Dias in Brazil. Photometric observations of its light curves were conducted on 6 nights in Feb, May, Jun 2015. The brightness of Mu Centauri was measured as magnitude difference with respect to several comparison stars in the field...