Thursday, November 15, 2012

1211.3112 (Thomas Nelson et al.)

A massive, delayed ejection event in the 2011 outburst of T Pyxidis    [PDF]

Thomas Nelson, Laura Chomiuk, Nirupam Roy, J. L. Sokoloski, Koji Mukai, Miriam I. Krauss, Amy J. Mioduszewski, Michael P. Rupen, Jennifer Weston
Despite being the prototype of its class, T Pyx is arguably the most unusual and poorly understood recurrent nova. Here, we use radio observations with the VLA to trace the evolution of the ejecta over the course of the 2011 outburst of T Pyx. The radio emission, which is consistent with thermal emission from the nova ejecta, began rising surprisingly late in the outburst, indicating that the bulk of the radio-emitting material was not ejected until ~50-100 days after optical discovery. Given that the radio-emitting material must have been ionized, and taking into account the resulting constraints on the electron temperature and clumpiness, the high peak flux densities of the radio emission require a massive ejection of 2-33 x 10^{-5} M_sol. This ejecta mass is much higher than previous theoretical predictions of outbursts in T Pyx, and implies a very high mass accretion rate onto the white dwarf between outbursts.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3112

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