| Accretion onto Magnetic White Dwarfs (2007) | |||||||||||||
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| . Recent developments in the accretion onto magnetic white dwarfs are reviewed. Accreting magnetic white dwarfs display many of the characteristics of accreting systems of a galactic scale, with the advantage that in these systems the accreting material is collimated into a relatively well-determined 1-dimensional flow. INTRODUCTION Accreting magnetic white dwarfs occur in binary systems in which the companion secondary star is (at least approximately) on the main sequence. In this guise they are called magnetic cataclysmic variables (mCVs) (see Cropper 1990 [1], Patterson 1994 [2] and Warner 1995 [3] for reviews). CVs exist with degenerate companions, and it is likely that the first mCV with a degenerate companion has been recently been found (Cropper et al 1998 [4]). There are other classes of accreting white dwarfs, in which the secondary is evolved (such as the recurrent novae and some symbiotic stars): however, so far no magnetic examples of such systems have been identified.... | |||||||||||||
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