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Description
The pulsation periods of RR-Lyrae stars usually vary with time, and they are often used as probes to study the mechanism behind the variation. After the early discovery that the pulsation period of the RR-Lyrae star AXUMa decreased rapidly, in further research, we made multiband photometric observations of this star using the Sino-Thai 70cm telescope and the 60cm telescope at Yunnan Observatories, and collected its light-curve data from several photometry sky surveys. The O-C diagram confirmed that AX UMa has a rapid period decrease with a rate of -7.752{+/-}0.005days/Myr, which indicates that it is the fastest-period decreasing ab-type RR Lyrae star in the Galactic field. Moreover, the O-C residuals contain additional periodic variations. We suppose that the variation with a long period is probably caused by the light-travel time effect as the star orbits in a binary system. The calculation shows that the lower mass limit of the companion is about 1M{sun}. Combined with the full amplitudes and color indexes, we suggested that the companion is probably a hot subdwarf star. We compared the light curves of AXUMa and those of another binary evolution pulsator, OGLE-BLG-RRLYR-02792, and found that the former shows the characteristics of ab-type RR-Lyrae stars, while the latter is more like an extreme long-period c-type RR-Lyrae star. However, the absence of a bump in the light curves implies that the mass loss has occurred in the outer atmosphere of AXUMa. The special features of AXUMa make it worth more attention and further observations.
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