No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
Over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that the once commonly held belief that the explosions of dwarf novae are caused by runaway thermonuclear reactions of accreted hydrogen on the surface of a white dwarf is not easily reconcilable with the growing observational data now extending from infra-red to x-ray wavelengths. It cannot fit the disk location of the outburst, the outburst energetics and repetition period (Bath et al. 1974) and the spectrum changes at outburst. The discovery that dwarf novae are semi-detached binaries opened the possibility that the explosions are caused by bursting mass accretion on to the white dwarf (Smak (1971), Bath (1973), Osaki (1974)). This model has now become a powerful tool for investigating the physical and spectroscopic properties of these systems.