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16 February 2025
 
  » arxiv » 1109.0065

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The 2011 Eruption of the Recurrent Nova T Pyxidis; the Discovery, the Pre-eruption Rise, the Pre-eruption Orbital Period, and the Reason for the Long Delay
Bradley E. Schaefer ; Arlo U. Landolt ; Michael Linnolt ; Rod Stubbings ; Grzegorz Pojmanski ; Alan Plummer ; Stephen Kerr ; Peter Nelson ; Rolf Carstens ; Margaret Streamer ; Thomas Richards ; Gordon Myers ; William G. Dillon ;
Date 1 Sep 2011
AbstractWe report the discovery by M. Linnolt on JD 2455665.7931 (UT 2011 April 14.29) of the sixth eruption of the recurrent nova T Pyxidis. This discovery was made just as the initial fast rise was starting, so with fast notification and response by observers worldwide, the entire initial rise was covered (the first for any nova) with fine time resolution and in three filters. The speed of the rise peaked at 9 mag/day, while the light curve is well fit over only the first two days by a model with a uniformly expanding sphere. We also report the discovery by R. Stubbings of a pre-eruption rise starting 11 days before the eruption, peaking 1.1 mag brighter than its long-time average, and then fading back towards quiescence five days before the eruption. This unique and mysterious behavior is only the fourth known anticipatory rise/dip closely spaced before a nova eruption. We present 19 timings of photometric minima from 1986 to February 2011, where the orbital period is fast increasing with P/Pdot=+313,000 years. From 2008-2011, T Pyx had a small change in this rate of increase, so that the orbital period at the time of eruption was 0.07622916+-0.00000008 days. This strong and steady increase of the orbital period can only come from mass transfer, for which we calculate a rate of 10^{-6.0+-0.5} Msun/yr for mass leaving the companion star. We report 6114 magnitudes between 1890 and 2011, for an average B=15.59+-0.01 from 1967-2011, which allows for an eruption in 2011 if the blue flux is nearly proportional to the accretion rate. We present a model for the infrared-to-X-ray emission during quiescence as being from a 34,000 K blackbody nearly filling the Roche lobe (caused by the very high accretion rate creating an extended envelope around the accretion column) plus a nu^0.9 non-thermal component (from the optically-thin outer and circumbinary regions).
Source arXiv, 1109.0065
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