1000 cataclysmic variables from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey

Creators: Breedt, E.; Gänsicke, B. T.; Drake, A. J.; Rodríguez-Gil, P.; Parsons, S. G.; Marsh, T. R.; Szkody, P.; Schreiber, M. R.; Djorgovski, S. G.

Abstract

Over six years of operation, the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS) has identified 1043 cataclysmic variable (CV) candidates – the largest sample of CVs from a single survey to date. Here, we provide spectroscopic identification of 85 systems fainter than g ≥ 19, including three AM Canum Venaticorum binaries, one helium-enriched CV, one polar and one new eclipsing CV. We analyse the outburst properties of the full sample and show that it contains a large fraction of low-accretion-rate CVs with long outburst recurrence times. We argue that most of the high-accretion-rate dwarf novae in the survey footprint have already been found and that future CRTS discoveries will be mostly low-accretion-rate systems. We find that CVs with white-dwarf-dominated spectra have significantly fewer outbursts in their CRTS light curves compared to disc-dominated CVs, reflecting the difference in their accretion rates. Comparing the CRTS sample to other samples of CVs, we estimate the overall external completeness to be 23.6 per cent, but show that as much as 56 per cent of CVs have variability amplitudes that are too small to be selected using the transient selection criteria employed by current ground-based surveys. The full table of CRTS CVs, including their outburst and spectroscopic properties examined in this paper, is provided in the online materials.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 July 6. Received 2014 July 5; in original form 2014 May 13. We thank the referee, Steve Howell, for a helpful and positive report that improved the clarity of our presentation. We also thank Gayathri Eknath who helped to compile the outburst data used in Fig. 6 during a summer project at the University of Warwick. EB and TRM are supported by a grant from the UK STFC, number ST/L000733/1. BTG is supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 320964 (WDTracer). PRG is supported by a Ramón y Cajal fellowship (RYC–2010–05762), and acknowledges support provided by the Spanish grant AYA2012–38700. SGP and MRS acknowledge financial support from FONDECYT in the form of grants number 3140585 and 1141269, respectively. PS acknowledges support from the NSF through grant AST-1008734. CRTS are supported by the US NSF under grants AST-0909182 and CNS-0540369. The work at Caltech was supported in part by the NASA Fermi grant 08-FERMI08-0025, and by the Ajax Foundation. The CSS survey is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant no. NNG05GF22G issued through the Science Mission Directorate Near-Earth Objects Observations Programme. The spectra presented in this paper were obtained with the Gemini Telescopes, under programmes GN-2010B-Q-76, GS-2010B-Q-57, GN-2011A-Q-74, GS-2011A-Q-49 and GN-2013A-Q-89, and the GTC, under programme ID GTC30-11A. The Gemini Observatory is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the NSF (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), the Australian Research Council (Australia), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil) and Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina). The GTC is operated at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, on the island of La Palma. We gratefully acknowledge the use of the TOPCAT software (Taylor 2005) in this research, the International Variable Star Index data base (VSX) operated at AAVSO, Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as the SDSS, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the NSF, and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science. Further information, including a list of participating institutions may be found on the SDSS web sites, http://www.sdss.org/ (for SDSS-I and SDSS-II) and http://www.sdss3.org/ (for SDSS-III).

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Published - MNRAS-2014-Breedt-3174-207.pdf

Submitted - 1407.1907v1.pdf

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