Next Section: Introduction

Stability of Accretion Shocks with a Composite Cooling Function

Curtis J. Saxton - Kinwah Wu
Helen Pongracic

Special Research Centre for Theoretical Astrophysics, School of Physics, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Air Operations Division, Aeronautical and Maritime Research Laboratory, DSTO, VIC 3001, Australia

Abstract:

Stability of accretion onto magnetic white dwarfs is investigated via perturbation analysis. We consider a cooling function with composite power-laws, and the power-law indices are appropriate for bremsstrahlung and optically thick cyclotron cooling. We have found that the presence of cyclotron cooling generally suppresses the instability, consistent with numerical simulations by other investigators.

keywords: accretion  --  shock waves  --  binaries: close  --  stars: white dwarfs

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