Cataclysmic Variables in the Second Year of the Zwicky Transient Facility

Creators: Szkody, Paula; Olde Loohuis, Claire; Koplitz, Brad; van Roestel, Jan; Dicenzo, Brooke; Ho, Anna Y. Q.; Hillenbrand, Lynne A.; Bellm, Eric C.; Dekany, Richard; Drake, Andrew J.; Duev, Dmitry A.; Graham, Matthew J.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Mahabal, Ashish A.; Masci, Frank J.; Neill, James D.; Riddle, Reed; Rusholme, Benjamin; Sollerman, Jesper; Walters, Richard

Abstract

Using a filter in the GROWTH Marshal based on color and the amplitude and timescale of variability, we have identified 372 objects as known or candidate cataclysmic variables (CVs) during the second year of the operation of the Zwicky Transient Facility. From the available difference imaging data, we found that 93 are previously confirmed CVs and 279 are strong candidates. Spectra of four of the candidates confirm them as CVs by the presence of Balmer emission lines, while one of the four has prominent He ii lines indicative of containing a magnetic white dwarf. Gaia EDR3 parallaxes are available for 154 of these systems, resulting in distances from 108–2096 pc and absolute magnitudes in the range of 7.5–15.0, with the largest number of candidates between 10.5 and 12.5. The total numbers are 21% higher than from the previous year of the survey with a greater number of distances available but a smaller percentage of systems close to the Galactic plane. Comparison of these findings with a machine-learning method of searching all the light curves reveals large differences in each data set related to the parameters involved in the search process.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 April 27; revised 2021 June 16; accepted 2021 June 24; published 2021 August 10. P.S., B.K., C.L., and B.D. acknowledge funding from NSF grant AST-1514737. A.Y.Q.H. is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-1144469. M.C. is supported by the David and Ellen Lee Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. M.L.G. acknowledges support from the DIRAC Institute in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. The DIRAC Institute is supported through generous gifts from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and the Washington Research Foundation. This work was supported by the GROWTH project funded by the National Science Foundation under PIRE grant No. 1545949, and based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48 inch and 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. Z.T.F. is supported by the NSF under grant AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley national Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. This work also makes use of observations from the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network. Facility: Keck:I;PO:1.2m - .

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