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Published June 20, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

Classical Novae in Andromeda: Light Curves from the Palomar Transient Factory and GALEX

Abstract

We present optical light curves of 29 novae in M31 during the 2009 and 2010 observing seasons of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). The dynamic and rapid cadences in PTF monitoring of M31, from one day to ten minutes, provide excellent temporal coverage of nova light curves, enabling us to record the photometric evolution of M31 novae in unprecedented detail. We also detect eight of these novae in the near-ultraviolet (UV) band with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite. Novae M31N 2009-10b and M31N 2010-11a show prominent UV emission peaking a few days prior to their optical maxima, possibly implying aspherical outbursts. Additionally, our blueshifted spectrum of the recent outburst of PT And (M31N 2010-12a) indicates that it is a recurrent nova in M31 and not a dwarf nova in the Milky Way as was previously assumed. Finally, we systematically searched for novae in all confirmed globular clusters (GCs) of M31 and found only M31N 2010-10f associated with Bol 126. The specific nova rate in the M31 GC system is thus about one per year, which is not enhanced relative to the rate outside the GC system.

Additional Information

© 2012 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2012 January 12; accepted 2012 April 16; published 2012 June 5. We thank the referee, Dr. Massimo Della Valle, for very helpful comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript. We thank Marina Orio and Sumin Tang for valuable discussions. We thank the Weizmann Monitoring Team (A. Gal-Yam, I. Arcavi, D. Polishook, A. Sternberg, O. Yaron, D. Xu) for daily monitoring of transient candidates from the PTF discovery stream. M.M.K. acknowledges support from the Hubble Fellowship and the Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship. S.B.C wishes to acknowledge generous support from Gary and Cynthia Bengier, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/Swift grant NNX10AI21G, NASA/Fermi grant NNX1OA057G, and National Science Foundation (NSF) grant AST–0908886. This research was supported in part by Tsinghua Center for Astrophysics (THCA), by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grants 10373009, 10533020, and 11073014 at Tsinghua University, by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) under State Key Development Program for Basic Research grant 2012CB821800, by the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program, by the SRFDP 20050003088, 200800030071, and 20110002110008, and by the Yangtze Endowment from the Ministry of Education at Tsinghua University. GALEX (Galaxy Evolution Explorer) is a NASA Small Explorer, launched in 2003 April. We gratefully acknowledge NASA's support for construction, operation, and science analysis for the GALEX mission, developed in cooperation with the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales of France and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, provided staff, computational resources and data storage for PTF. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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August 22, 2023
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