The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has identified a total of 212 cataclysmic variables, most of which are fainter than 18th magnitude. This is the deepest and most populous homogeneous sample of cataclysmic variables to date, and we are undertaking a project to characterise this population. We have found that the SDSS sample is dominated by a great ``silent majority'' of old and faint CVs. We detect, for the first time, a population spike at the minimum period of 80 minutes which has been predicted by theoretical studies for over a decade.
@article{arxiv.0810.4823,
title = {The fainter the better: cataclysmic variable stars from the SDSS},
author = {John Southworth and B T Gaensicke and T R Marsh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.4823},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 7 figures, proceedings of the 16th European White Dwarf Workshop (Barcalona, July 2008), in press