Detecting the Brown Dwarf Secondary Stars in Cataclysmic Variables

Details Detecting the Brown Dwarf Secondary Stars in Cataclysmic Variables Detecting the Brown Dwarf Secondary Stars in Cataclysmic Variables

Sep 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004sptz.prop.2314h&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #2314

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are semi-detached binary stars consisting of a white dwarf (WD) primary star that accretes material from a low mass secondary star, with typical orbital periods of less than 1 day. Eventually, the ongoing mass loss from the secondary star causes it to drop below the mass limit for hydrogen burning, and the secondary star becomes a degenerate brown dwarf (BD). Population synthesis studies predict that approximately 70% of all CVs should contain BD secondary stars. There is plausible indirect evidence for the existence of BDs in 39 CVs; however, there is currently no conclusive direct evidence for any CV containing a BD. Even if all of the potential candidates do indeed contain BD secondary stars, this is only a few percent of all CVs - a huge deficit compared to 70% of CVs predicted by population synthesis studies. We propose to observe 23 candidate CVs with BD secondary stars using the Infrared Array Camera and Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope to directly determine the spectral type of the secondary star. These 23 CVs represent the best candidates for detecting BD secondary stars with Spitzer. The proposed Spitzer study will allow us to ascertain the fraction of CVs containing BD secondary stars and allow us to constrain the explanation for the characteristics of the observed population of CVs.

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