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Wed Oct 13, 2010

Accretion disk disruption from a superexpansion burst

In one of the public 2008 observations of bursters by RXTE we noticed a new event from a relatively quiet source, 2S 0918-549. On closer inspection, Jean in 't Zand noticed a remarkable interval of strong variability late in this long (~300 s) event. This type of variability, which is achromatic (i.e. energy-independent) and seems to be restricted to bursts with extremely strong radius-expansion, may arise from disruption and later resettling of the accretion disk. Our paper has been accepted by A&A and is also out at arXiv:1009.5359.

Labels: 2010, /thermonuclear bursts