TT Arietis - Observations of a Cataclysmic Variable Star with the MOST Space Telescope

TL;DR

This study used the MOST space telescope to observe TT Arietis, revealing its orbital period and flux oscillations, but did not resolve the detailed accretion disk structure.

Contribution

First detailed photometric analysis of TT Arietis using space-based observations to identify its orbital period and flux oscillations.

Findings

Orbital period of 3.19 hours identified.

Detected periodic flux oscillations.

High-cadence data did not reveal accretion disk fine structure.

Abstract

We measured the photometric flux of the cataclysmic variable TT Arietis (BD+14 341) using the MOST space telescope. Periodic oscillations of the flux reveal the orbital period as well as other features of this binary system. We applied a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) on a reduced dataset to retrieve the frequencies of TT Arietis. The analysis of the system revealed a photometric period of 3.19 hours. Though the MOST data has a high cadence of 52.8 seconds, a fine structure of the accretion disk is not obvious.