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Preprint 08/10

Progress On Modelling Of Accretion Discs In AM CVn Stars

Thorsten Nagel, Désirée Krausz, Thomas Rauch, and Klaus Werner

Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Kepler Center for Astro and Particle Physics, Eberhard Karls University, Sand 1, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany

To be published in: The proceedings of the Physics of Accreting Compact Binaries Conference

Abstract. AM CVn stars are close, interacting binary systems with helium-dominated spectra. The nature of the donor star remains unclear but the accretion disc represents the chemical composition of its atmosphere. Analysing the disc will therefore help us to understand the donor star and the formation of these systems. We computed a grid of metal-line blanketed NLTE accretion-disc spectra for a wide parameter space by solving self-consistently the radiative-transfer equations and the equations describing the vertical structure using our accretion disc code AcDc. We achieve emission-line and absorption-line spectra for low and high mass-accretion rates, respectively. Comparing an observed spectrum of CE 315 with our accretion-disc models, we find that the disc of CE 315 exhibits a strong silicon underabundance confirming the hypothesis that it is a population II object.
 
Key words: cataclysmic variables, accretion discs, AMCVn stars

Preprint (415 kb PDF file including figures)

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