The Anomalous Accretion Disk of the Cataclysmic Variable RW Sextantis

Details The Anomalous Accretion Disk of the Cataclysmic Variable RW Sextantis The Anomalous Accretion Disk of the Cataclysmic Variable RW Sextantis

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21733804l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #338.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

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Scientific paper

The standard model for stable Cataclysmic Variable (CV) accretion disks (Frank, King and Raine 1992) derives an explicit analytic expression for the disk effective temperature as function of radial distance from the white dwarf (WD). That model specifies that the effective temperature, Teff(R), varies with R as ()0.25, where () represents a combination of parameters including R, the mass transfer rate M(dot), and other parameters. It is well known that fits of standard model synthetic spectra to observed CV spectra find almost no instances of agreement. We have derived a generalized expression for the radial temperature gradient, which preserves the total disk luminosity as function of M(dot) but permits a different exponent from the theoretical value of 0.25, and have applied it to RW Sex (Linnell et al.,2010,ApJ, 719,271). We find an excellent fit to observed FUSE and IUE spectra for an exponent of 0.125, curiously close to 1/2 the theoretical value. Our annulus synthetic spectra, combined to represent the accretion disk, were produced with program TLUSTY, were non-LTE and included H, He, C, Mg, Al, Si, and Fe as explicit ions. We illustrate our results with a plot showing the failure to fit RW Sex for a range of M(dot) values, our model fit to the observations, and a chi2 plot showing the selection of the exponent 0.125 as the best fit for the M(dot) range shown. (For the final model parameters see the paper cited.)

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