研究期間：10108~10207;Compact objects – white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes – are endings of star evolution, which play important roles in the stellar life cycle. The accreting binaries with compact objects as accretors, including X-ray binary and cataclysmic variable, are important astrophysical objects to study the physics of compact objects, as well as accretion disk dynamics in astronomy. Superorbital modulations, whose time scales are much longer than their corresponding binary orbital periods, have been seen in many of accreting binaries. The origins of such variations are still unclear but they could be caused by disk precession, accretion enhancement induced by third companion or disk thermal instability. We propose to systematically study these long-term variations using a newly developed adaptive analysis technique, Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT), which is able to probe the instantaneous period and amplitude to improve our knowledge for the dynamics of accretion disks. On the other hand, accretion disk precession may couple with orbital motion and exhibits superhump variation with period of a few percent longer or shorter than the corresponding orbital period. Studying superhump in cataclysmic variables or X-ray binaries can provide us additional information for the binary system. For the accreting millisecond pulsars, there are totally 14 were verified since the first one was discovered in 1998 but many of there basic properties are still unrevealed. We propose to continue investigating this category of astrophysical objects to learn more about the physics of neutron star. The spin is one of the only three measurable physical parameters for black hole. Recently astronomers found the spin of the stellar size black hole in accreting binary may be evaluated from its radius of innermost stable circular orbit by either from its iron line profile or fitting its X-ray continuum. We plan to use some newly developed spectral models to measure or constrain some spins of some selected black holes.
