Bibcode
Breedt, E.; Gänsicke, B. T.; Drake, A. J.; Rodríguez-Gil, P.; Parsons, S. G.; Marsh, T. R.; Szkody, P.; Schreiber, M. R.; Djorgovski, S. G.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 443, Issue 4, p.3174-3207
Advertised on:
10
2014
Citations
63
Refereed citations
54
Description
Over six years of operation, the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey
(CRTS) has identified 1043 cataclysmic variable (CV) candidates - the
largest sample of CVs from a single survey to date. Here, we provide
spectroscopic identification of 85 systems fainter than g ≥ 19,
including three AM Canum Venaticorum binaries, one helium-enriched CV,
one polar and one new eclipsing CV. We analyse the outburst properties
of the full sample and show that it contains a large fraction of
low-accretion-rate CVs with long outburst recurrence times. We argue
that most of the high-accretion-rate dwarf novae in the survey footprint
have already been found and that future CRTS discoveries will be mostly
low-accretion-rate systems. We find that CVs with white-dwarf-dominated
spectra have significantly fewer outbursts in their CRTS light curves
compared to disc-dominated CVs, reflecting the difference in their
accretion rates. Comparing the CRTS sample to other samples of CVs, we
estimate the overall external completeness to be 23.6 per cent, but show
that as much as 56 per cent of CVs have variability amplitudes that are
too small to be selected using the transient selection criteria employed
by current ground-based surveys. The full table of CRTS CVs, including
their outburst and spectroscopic properties examined in this paper, is
provided in the online materials.
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