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Published August 11, 2020 | Published
Journal Article Open

A MeerKAT survey of nearby nova-like cataclysmic variables

Abstract

We present the results of MeerKAT radio observations of 11 nearby nova-like cataclysmic variables (CVs). We have detected radio emission from IM Eri, RW Sex, V3885 Sgr, and V603 Aql. While RW Sex, V3885 Sgr, and V603 Aql had been previously detected, this is the first reported radio detection of IM Eri. Our observations have doubled the sample of non-magnetic CVs with sensitive radio data. We observe that at our radio detection limits, a specific optical luminosity ≳ 2.2 × 10¹⁸ erg s⁻¹ Hz⁻¹ (corresponding to M_V ≲ 6.0) is required to produce a radio detection. We also observe that the X-ray and radio luminosities of our detected nova-like CVs are on an extension of the L_X ∝ L^(∼0.7)_R power law originally proposed for non-pulsating neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries. We find no other correlations between the radio emission and emission in other wavebands or any other system parameters for the existing sample of radio-detected non-magnetic CVs. We measure in-band (0.9–1.7 GHz) radio spectral indices that are consistent with reports from earlier work. Finally, we constructed broad spectral energy distributions for our sample from published multiwavelength data, and use them to place constraints on the mass transfer rates of these systems.

Additional Information

© 2020 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) Accepted 2020 June 10. Received 2020 June 10; in original form 2020 May 6. We thank the anonymous referee for a helpful report. DMH thanks Mickael Coriat for assistance with radio data reduction. We thank Deanne Coppejans for making the published measurements used in Figs 2 and 3 available and for helpful discussions. Elme Breedt kindly provided a comprehensive catalogue of CVs and CV candidates. DMH acknowledges financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). PAW kindly acknowledges financial support from the University of Cape Town and the NRF. MLP acknowledges financial support from the NRF and the Newton Fund. JCAM-J is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT140101082), funded by the Australian government. This work was supported by the Oxford Centre for Astrophysical Surveys, which is funded through generous support from the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation. The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. We would like to thank the operators, SARAO staff, and ThunderKAT Large Survey Project team. This work has used data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This research has used the International VSX data base, operated at AAVSO, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The authors thank LCOGT and its staff for their continued support of ASAS-SN. ASAS-SN is supported by NSF grant AST-1515927. Development of ASAS-SN has been supported by NSF grant AST-0908816, the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and by George Skestos. Some of the research in this paper is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and obtained from the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is a collaboration between the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI/NASA), the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF/ESAC/ESA), and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC/NRC/CSA). This publication has used data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. This publication has used data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by NASA. Some of the data used were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. This research has used ASTROPY,4 a community-developed core PYTHOn package for Astronomy (Robitaille et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018). This research has used APLPY, an open-source plotting package for PYTHON (Robitaille & Bressert 2012). DATA AVAILABILITY. The MeerKAT data presented in this article are subject to the standard data access policy of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory.

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August 19, 2023
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