English

A MeerKAT Survey of Nearby Novalike Cataclysmic Variables

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2020-07-01 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We present the results of MeerKAT radio observations of eleven nearby novalike cataclysmic variables. We have detected radio emission from IM Eri, RW Sex, V3885 Sgr and V603 Aql. While RW Sex, V3885 Sgr and V603 Aql had been previously detected, this is the first reported radio detection of IM Eri. Our observations have doubled the sample of non-magnetic CVs with sensitive radio data. We observe that at our radio detection limits, a specific optical luminosity 2.2×1018\gtrsim 2.2\times 10^{18} erg/s/Hz (corresponding to MV6.0M_V \lesssim 6.0) is required to produce a radio detection. We also observe that the X-ray and radio luminosities of our detected novalikes are on an extension of the LXLR0.7L_{X} \propto L_{R}^{\sim 0.7} power law originally proposed for non-pulsating neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries. We find no other correlations between the radio emission and emission in other wavebands or any other system parameters for the existing sample of radio-detected non-magnetic CVs. We measure in-band (0.9-1.7 GHz) radio spectral indices that are consistent with reports from earlier work. Finally, we constructed broad spectral energy distributions for our sample from published multi-wavelength data, and use them to place constraints on the mass transfer rates of these systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.07918,
  title  = {A MeerKAT Survey of Nearby Novalike Cataclysmic Variables},
  author = {D. M. Hewitt and M. L. Pretorius and P. A. Woudt and E. Tremou and J. C. A. Miller-Jones and C. Knigge and N. Castro Segura and D. R. A. Williams and R. P. Fender and R. Armstrong and P. Groot and I. Heywood and A. Horesh and A. J. van der Horst and E. Koerding and V. A. McBride and K. P. Mooley and A. Rowlinson and B. Stappers and R. A. M. J. Wijers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07918},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

16 pages, 9 figures, accepted to MNRAS