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(cba:news) introducing xss0056 (Joe Patterson) [2009-11-18T08:57:39Z]


Dear CBAers,

Pardon me for exceeding the legal limit (for the chatters), but I wanted to promote a star I just started to observe last night. That is XSS00564+4548... which I started in on after I saw that the CBAers were doing a fully adequate job with TT Ari from this longitude (western USA; we still ache for other longitudes).

This appears to be a DQ Her star with twin pulses around 8 and 8.5 minutes, plus some signals at low-frequency (conjectured orbital, plus one other possibly around 30 minutes). Pretty interesting. It's plenty bright (around 14.8), and well placed for very long observation in Cassiopeia. I have consecutive 8-hour nights on it, and am now begging for someone to carry the torch forward. As in... well... this coming night, and thereafter. Densely spaced long time series are precisely what's needed to enable great sensitivity in period searches. The usual CBA routine - unfiltered light, 30-60 s exposures, find a comparison you like and stick with it - will do just fine. There's a little companion roughly 10 arcsec east of the CV, at about 19th mag I think; probably not relevant unless the CV does something funny. You can find a chart and some details in Bikmaev et al., astro-ph 0603715.

The TT Ari campaign rolls on, and has now picked up spectroscopy, UV (Galex), and X-ray (Swift - thanks Koji!) - to go along with the optical coverage. It has been mostly in a "zero-accretion-light" state for a few days, with some little spits here and there. There's an orbital hump in the light curve, yet the color is quite blue - so most likely it's hot WD + heated secondary. It's strange: we love CVs because of their disks, but when the disks go away, then we're *really* interested.

joe