Bibcode
van Zyl, L.; Warner, B.; O'Donoghue, D.; Hellier, C.; Woudt, P.; Sullivan, D.; Pritchard, J.; Kemp, J.; Patterson, J.; Welsh, W.; Casares, J.; Shahbaz, T.; van der Hooft, F.; Vennes, S.
Referencia bibliográfica
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 350, Issue 1, pp. 307-316.
Fecha de publicación:
5
2004
Número de citas
78
Número de citas referidas
51
Descripción
The dwarf nova GW Librae (GW Lib) is the first cataclysmic variable (CV)
discovered to have a primary in a white dwarf instability strip, making
it the first multimode, non-radially pulsating star known to be
accreting. The primaries of CVs, embedded in hot, bright accretion
discs, are difficult to study directly. Applying the techniques of
asteroseismology to GW Lib could therefore give us an unprecedented look
at a white dwarf that has undergone ~109 yr of accretion.
However, an accreting white dwarf may have characteristics sufficiently
different from those of single pulsating white dwarfs to render the
standard models of white dwarf pulsations invalid for its study. This
paper presents amplitude spectra of GW Lib from a series of observing
campaigns conducted during 1997, 1998 and 2001. We find that the
dominant pulsation modes cluster at periods near 650, 370 and 230 s,
which also appear in linear combinations with each other. The pulsation
spectrum of GW Lib is highly unstable on time-scales of months, and
exhibits clusters of signals very closely spaced in frequency, with
separations on the order of 1 μHz.