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Accretion Disc Instabilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2017

A.R. King
A.R. King*
Affiliation:
Astronomy Group University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH, U.K.

Abstract

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I give a brief discussion of accretion disc instabilities, concentrating mainly on tidal instabilities caused by the presence of a binary companion. The superhumps observed in superoutbursts of SU UMa dwarf novae probably result from the excitation of a resonance in the accretion disc near the 3:1 commensurability with the binary orbit. This resonance can only appear for mass ratios q = M 2/M 1 < q erit ≃ 0.25 – 0.33: for larger mass ratios the available resonances are considerably weaker. Application of this picture to other types of binary suggests that the condition q < q erit may be necessary but not sufficient. Further, some cataclysmic systems show phenomena which could be tidal in origin even though the condition evidently fails.

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