Mu Centauri tagged posts

The Mysterious Cataclysmic Variable Star Mu Centauri

The mysterious cataclysmic variable star Mu Centauri

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...

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