Search for Low-Dimensional Chaos in Observational Data

We introduce the reader to the “global flow reconstruction method”. The purpose of the method is to see if a given temporal sequence has been generated by a low dimensional dynamics, and to determine that dimension and other properties of the dynamics. The method is shown to work very well on the well known Roessler system. An application of the method to the observational data of the light curve of the irregular variable star R Scuti is presented. This light curve is shown to have been generated by a 4 dimensional dynamics. From the functional form of the flow we find that the Lyapunov dimension is close to 3.1.