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Population Studies of Cataclysmic Variables
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
Extract
Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are idiosyncratic objects, but progress can be made by studying groups of them. To do this, one must identify samples that are representative of their true properties. Because of the wide variety of physics that occurs in CVs, they have a complex phenomenology in which effects are still being discovered (e.g. permanent superhumps: Patterson & Richman 1991). CV outbursts have their own complex phenomenology (but see Osaki 1995a,b and this volume, for ideas on unification for dwarf novae), so it is unwise to rely on outburst properties to give unbiased samples.
One wants to identify CVs by some property common to all of them. One such property is flickering; another is color excess. CVs are very blue, especially in the ultraviolet, with U – B < −0.46 for 95% of CVs (Bruch & Engel 1994). This color index also defines inclusion in the Palomar-Green (PG) survey (Green, Schmidt & Liebert 1986), and a preliminary list of PG CVs was given by Green et al. (1982). My Ph.D. thesis (Ringwald 1993) completed this work, being the first optically selected complete sample of CVs at high latitude. At the same time, Andy Silber was writing his Ph.D. thesis on an X-ray-selected sample of CVs, from the HEAO-A1 MC-LASS survey (Silber 1992). One might say I was Andy’s optical counterpart.
- Type
- Non-Magnetic Cataclysmic Variables
- Information
- International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 158: Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects , 1996 , pp. 89 - 92
- Copyright
- Copyright © Kluwer 1996