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cataclysmic variable

   Also found in: Acronyms, Wikipedia 0.01 sec.
cataclysmic variable [¦kad·ə¦kliz·mik ′ver·ē·ə·bəl]
(astronomy)
A star showing a sudden increase in the magnitude of light, followed by a slow fading of light; examples are novae and supernovae. Also known as explosive variable.
In particular, a short-period binary star, one of whose components is a white dwarf star, capable of irregularly timed but recurrent outbursts of brightness by 2 to 10,000.


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The survey data includes 185 cataclysmic variable stars, which is about three out of every four such objects discovered over the same time span and more than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey found in six years.
Introduction Dwarf novae are a class of cataclysmic variable (CV) star in which a white dwarf primary accretes material from a secondary star via Roche lobe overflow.
Stellar astrophysics: Cataclysmic Variable Stars Prof Warner and Dr Woudt continued the work on cataclysmic variable (CV) stars, involving a fair amount of high-speed photometry from the Southern African Large Telescope, with a particular emphasis on rapid oscillations (VW Hyi) and pulsations (GW Librae) in accreting white dwarfs.
 
 
 
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