Fast optical variability of SS 433

TL;DR

This study analyzes the optical variability of SS 433 using high-time-resolution photometry, revealing a characteristic break in its power spectrum that indicates the size of its emitting region and the nature of its optical emission components.

Contribution

The paper introduces a high-time-resolution photometric technique with minimal atmospheric distortion, enabling detailed analysis of SS 433's optical variability and its underlying physical structure.

Findings

Detected a break in the power spectrum at ~2.4e-3 Hz.

Estimated the accretion-disk photosphere size as 2e12 cm.

Observed variability amplitude reduction during eclipses, indicating a nonvariable optical component.

Abstract

We study the optical variability of the peculiar Galactic source SS 433 using the observations made with the Russian Turkish 1.5-m telescope (RTT150). A simple technique which allows to obtain high-quality photometric measurements with 0.3-1 s time resolution using ordinary CCD is described in detail. Using the test observations of nonvariable stars, we show that the atmospheric turbulence introduces no significant distortions into the measured light curves. Therefore, the data obtained in this way are well suited for studying the aperiodic variability of various objects. The large amount of SS 433 optical light curve measurements obtained in this way allowed us to obtain the power spectra of its flux variability with a record sensitivity up to frequencies of ~0.5 Hz and to detect its break at frequency =~2.4e-3 Hz. We suggest that this break in the power spectrum results from the smoothing of the optical flux variability due to a finite size of the emitting region. Based on our measurement of the break frequency in the power spectrum, we estimated the size of the accretion-disk photosphere as 2e12 cm. We show that the amplitude of the variability in SS 433 decreases sharply during accretion-disk eclipses, but it does not disappear completely. This suggests that the size of the variable optical emission source is comparable to that of the normal star whose size is therefore R_O \approx 2e12 cm \approx 30 R_sun. The decrease in flux variability amplitude during eclipses suggests the presence of a nonvariable optical emission component with a magnitude m_R=~13.2.