AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 101. Cataclysmic Variables and Novae
Display, Saturday, January 9, 1999, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[101.09] Modeling the Evolution of the Dust Shell Around Nova Centauri 1991

D.M. Leeber, T.E. Harrison (NMSU), G.S. Stringfellow (U of Colorado), J.J. Johnson (NMSU)

The infrared evolution of Nova Centauri 1991 (=V868 Cen) was unusual. We explore this evolution through modeling of the clumpy dust shell associated with this nova using the quasi­diffusion method which solves the radiative transfer problem as a two­point boundary value problem (Leung, ApJ 199, 1975). The code used to implement this method is CSDUST3 (Egan et al. Comp. Phys. Comm. 48, 1988). We present optical (UBVRI) and infrared (JHKL'M) photometry of V868 Cen covering the period from April 1991 to May 1998. Optical spectra, covering the period April 12, 1991 to August 9, 1992, revealed strong lines of oxygen superposed on a very red continuum. We have explored dust shell models using graphite, amorphous carbon, and silicate grains. During the earliest observations, the dust shell was composed of small hot grains. As the system rose to infrared maximum, the dust grains grew and the shell cooled to roughly 1,000 K. Following the infrared maximum, the dust shell did not cool even though its luminosity dropped by a factor of 100!


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dleeber@nmsu.edu

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