From jop at astro.columbia.edu Thu Jan 21 09:15:18 2021 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2021 09:15:18 -0500 Subject: (cba:news) T Pyx, AM CVn, and VX For Message-ID: Hi CBAers, A few comments re 2 old favorites, and one mystery star. Runs by Josch and Gordon in the last few days suggest that T Pyx MAY have sprouted a new low-frequency signal. I wouldn't call it likely... but it's curious - and anyway, we're not supposed to miss anything about THIS star! Very well-placed now; let's get some more runs and investigate. AM CVn is back in the morning sky. Our paper is ~ready to fly, but some early-season runs of >3 hours would help it. VX For. In ~1990 I was on a long run in Chile, when this star first erupted. I obtained long runs on 9 (I think) consecutive nights. To my chagrin, the light curve was always ~flat. I wouldn't have stayed with it, except that it sits next to a beautiful galaxy, and I loved staring at that galaxy every 40 seconds. The spectrum clearly said "dwarf nova", but I had never seen - and still haven't - seen a dwarf nova with so little variability. And which didn't reveal at least a HINT about its period. Alas, nothing happened in the galaxy either. It looks like I wrote about this star, when it erupted again in 2009... and it's on Rod Stubbings' website. Anyway, we still know very little about this fascinating star. A worthy target. ____________________________________________________________ Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA) mailing lists https://cbastro.org/communications/mailing-lists/