RV Corvi is an eclipsingbinary star system in the southern constellation of Corvus. The brightness of the pair regularly ranges in apparent visual magnitude from 8.6 down to 9.16 over a period 18 hours,[4] even the brightest of which is too faint to be visible to the naked eye. The system is located at a distance of approximately 690 light-years from the Sun based on parallax measurements, and is drifting further away with a radial velocity of ~19 km/s.[8]
The variability of this system was discovered by H. H. Swope.[11] In 1942, Irene G. Buttery published an orbital period of 0.74728 days for the system, showing this is an eclipsing binary.[12] It is a near-contact binary with both stars showing the effect of tidal interactions and the facing sides are less than 10% of the orbital separation apart, but are not in contact.[13] One or both stars may show an excess of luminosity on their facing sides.[9] The system is composed of stars of spectral types F0 and G0, which orbit each other every 0.7473 days.[6]
^Houk, Nancy; Smith-Moore, M. (1978). Michigan catalogue of two-dimensional spectral types for the HD stars. Vol. 4. Ann Arbor: Dept. of Astronomy, University of Michigan. Bibcode:1988mcts.book.....H.
^Abhyankar, K. D.; Parthasarathy, M.; Sanwal, N. B.; Sarma, M. B. K. (January 1974). "UBV photometry of RV CrV". Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement. 13: 101. Bibcode:1974A&AS...13..101A.
^Buttery, Irene G. (1942). "Twenty-two new variable stars in MWF 10". Annals of Harvard College Observatory. 109: 25–26. Bibcode:1942AnHar.109...25B.
^Shaw, J. Scott; et al. (April 1996). "Near-Contact Binary Systems in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey". Astrophysical Journal. 461: 951. Bibcode:1996ApJ...461..951S. doi:10.1086/177116.