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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
The existence of some variable stars producing very complicated light curves is well known. Theoretical calculations suggest that the irregular behaviour of the pulsation models in the RV Tauri and W Virginis regime is low dimensional is the result of period-doubling or tangent bifurcations (see e.g. Buchler and Kovács 1987, Kovács and Buchler 1988, Tanaka and Takeuti 1988).
The light variation of the RV Tauri star R Scuti covering 150 years was analyzed by Kolláth (1990). A striking similarity was found between the reconstructed attractor of the Rössler model and that of the light variation of R Scuti. This result confirms the theoretical prediction of the existence of chaos, but a discrepancy still exists between the theory and observation. We could not find evidence for low dimension (D = 2– 3). The analyses of other stars also show rather erratic behaviour (e.g. Cannizzo and Goodings 1988, Cannizzo et al. 1990). A possible answer for this discrepancy is the treatment of stochastic perturbations by convection (Perdang 1991).