An Accurate Geometric Distance to the Compact Binary SS Cygni Vindicates Accretion Disc Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dwarf novae are white dwarfs accreting matter from a nearby red dwarf companion. Their regular outbursts are explained by a thermal-viscous instability in the accretion disc, described by the disc instability model that has since been successfully extended to other accreting systems. However, the prototypical dwarf nova, SS Cygni, presents a major challenge to our understanding of accretion disc theory. At the distance of 159 ± 12 parsecs measured by the Hubble Space Telescope, it is too luminous to be undergoing the observed regular outbursts. Using very long baseline interferometric radio observations, we report an accurate, model-independent distance to SS Cygni that places the source substantially closer at 114 ± 2 parsecs. This reconciles the source behavior with our understanding of accretion disc theory in accreting compact objects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".