Light curve of R Cygni

For this, a smoothed and noise-filtered signal was created from the averaged data and with the help of time delay embedding, we have tried to reconstruct the attractor of the system. The main result is that R Cygni shows such period-doubling events that can be interpreted as being caused by a repetitive bifurcation of the chaotic attractor between a period 2T orbit and chaos. The switch between these two states occurs in a certain compact region of the phase space, where the light curve is characterized by ~1500-day long transients.

The Lyapunov spectrum was computed for various embedding parameters confirming the chaotic attractor, although the exponents suffer from quite high uncertainty because of the applied approximation. Finally, the light curve is compared with a simple one zone model generated by a third-order differential equation which exhibits well-expressed period-doubling bifurcation. The strong resemblance is another argument for chaotic behaviour.

Further studies should address the problem of global flow reconstruction, including the determination of the accurate Lyapunov exponents and dimension.