Fireballs, Flares and Flickering
Abstract
We review our understanding of the prototype ``Propeller'' system AE Aqr and we examine its flaring behaviour in detail. The flares are thought to arise from collisions between high density regions in the material expelled from the system after interaction with the rapidly rotating magnetosphere of the white dwarf. We show calculations of the time-dependent emergent optical spectra from the resulting hot, expanding ball of gas and derive values for the mass, lengthscale and temperature of the material involved. We see that the fits suggest that the secondary star in this system has reduced metal abundances and that, counter-intuitively, the evolution of the fireballs is best modelled as isothermal.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0302153,
title = {Fireballs, Flares and Flickering},
author = {K. J. Pearson and Keith Horne and Warren Skidmore},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0302153},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
14 pages, 5 figures, Review of propeller systems to appear in the proceedings of Magnetic Cataclysmic Variables IAU Coll. 190, eds. M. Cropper, S. Vreilmann