Laurens has just posted a nice paper looking at short recurrence time thermonuclear (type-I) bursts as seen by RXTE and BeppoSAX. These bursts occur after waiting times of as short as a few minutes, which is not sufficient to reach the critical conditions for ignition. The likely explanation is that the bursts ignite from fuel leftover from the previous event, but the details remain a bit of a mystery. Interestingly, short recurrence time bursts are not seen from sources (or candidate sources) that accrete primarily He. The paper was just accepted by ApJ.

Read the paper arXiv:1005.3302

Labels: 2010, thermonuclear bursts