English

Cataclysmic Variables in the Second Year of the Zwicky Transient Facility

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2022-05-06 v1

Abstract

Using a filter in the GROWTH Marshal based on color and the amplitude and the timescale of variability, we have identified 372 objects as known or candidate cataclysmic variables (CVs) during the second year of operation of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). From the available difference imaging data, we found that 93 are previously confirmed CVs, and 279 are strong candidates. Spectra of four of the candidates confirm them as CVs by the presence of Balmer emission lines, while one of the four has prominent HeII lines indicative of containing a magnetic white dwarf. Gaia EDR3 parallaxes are available for 154 of these systems, resulting in distances from 108-2096 pc and absolute magnitudes in the range of 7.5-15.0, with the largest number of candidates between 10.5-12.5. The total numbers are 21% higher than from the previous year of the survey with a greater number of distances available but a smaller percentage of systems close to the Galactic plane. Comparison of these findings with a machine learning method of searching all the light curves reveals large differences in each dataset related to the parameters involved in the search process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.07051,
  title  = {Cataclysmic Variables in the Second Year of the Zwicky Transient Facility},
  author = {Paula Szkody and Clair Olde Loohuis and Brad Koplitz and Jan van Roestel and Brooke Dicenzo and Anna Y. Q. Ho and Lynne A. Hillenbrand and Eric C. Bellm and Richard DeKany and Andrew J. Drake and Dmitry A. Duev and Matthew J. Graham and Mansi M. Kasliwal and Ashish A. Mahabal and Frank J. Masci and James D. Neill and Reed Riddle and Benjamin Rusholme and Jesper Sollerman and Richard Walters},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.07051},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted in AJ, 24 pages, 2 tables, 7 figures