Five new outbursting AM CVn systems discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory

Creators: Levitan, David; Kupfer, Thomas; Groot, Paul J.; Kulkarni, Shrinivas R.; Prince, Thomas A.; Simonian, Gregory V.; Arcavi, Iair; Bloom, Joshua S.; Laher, Russ; Nugent, Peter E.; Ofek, Eran O.; Sesar, Branimir; Surace, Jason

Abstract

We present five new outbursting AM CVn systems and one candidate discovered as part of an ongoing search for such systems using the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). This is the first large-area, systematic search for AM CVn systems using only large-amplitude photometric variability to select candidates. Three of the confirmed systems and the candidate system were discovered as part of the PTF transient search. Two systems were found as part of a search for outbursts through the PTF photometric data base. We discuss the observed characteristics of each of these systems, including the orbital periods of two systems. We also consider the position of these systems, selected in a colour-independent survey, in colour–colour space and compare to systems selected solely by their colours. We find that the colours of our newly discovered systems do not differ significantly from those of previously known systems, but significant errors preclude a definitive answer.

Additional Information

© 2013 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2012 December 18. Received 2012 December 14; in original form 2012 September 18. First published online: February 1, 2013. We thank Sagi Ben-Ami, Yi Cao, Brad Cenko, Avishay Gal-Yam, Assaf Horesh, Mansi Kasliwal, Thomas Matheson, Kunal Mooley and Robert Quimby for help in obtaining observations and reducing data. We thank Kevin Rykoski and Carolyn Heffner at the Palomar Observatory for developing the fast cadence mode on the LFC instrument. Part of this work was performed by TAP while at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF Grant #1066293. PJG thanks the California Institute of Technology for its hospitality during his sabbatical stay. Observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Palomar Transient Factory project, a scientific collaboration between the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Las Cumbres Observatory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Based in part on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, operated on the island of La Palma jointly by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOTSA. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System.

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