AT 2019qyl in NGC 300: Internal Collisions in the Early Outflow from a Very Fast Nova in a Symbiotic Binary

Creators: Jencson, Jacob E.; Andrews, Jennifer E.; Bond, Howard E.; Karambelkar, Viraj; Sand, David J.; Van Dyk, Schuyler D.; Blagorodnova, Nadejda; Boyer, Martha L.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Lau, Ryan M.; Mohamed, Shazrene; Williams, Robert; Whitelock, Patricia A.; Amaro, Rachael C.; Bostroem, K. Azalee; Dong, Yize; Lundquist, Michael J.; Valenti, Stefano; Wyatt, Samuel D.; Burke, Jamie; De, Kishalay; Jha, Saurabh W.; Johansson, Joel; Rojas-Bravo, César; Coulter, David A.; Foley, Ryan J.; Gehrz, Robert D.; Haislip, Joshua; Hiramatsu, Daichi; Howell, D. Andrew; Kilpatrick, Charles D.; Masci, Frank J.; McCully, Curtis; Ngeow, Chow-Choong; Pan, Yen-Chen; Pellegrino, Craig; Piro, Anthony L.; Kouprianov, Vladimir; Reichart, Daniel E.; Rest, Armin; Rest, Sofia; Smith, Nathan

Abstract

Nova eruptions, thermonuclear explosions on the surfaces of white dwarfs (WDs), are now recognized to be among the most common shock-powered astrophysical transients. We present the early discovery and rapid ultraviolet (UV), optical, and infrared (IR) temporal development of AT 2019qyl, a recent nova in the nearby Sculptor Group galaxy NGC 300. The light curve shows a rapid rise lasting ≲1 day, reaching a peak absolute magnitude of M_V = −9.2 mag and a very fast decline, fading by 2 mag over 3.5 days. A steep dropoff in the light curves after 71 days and the rapid decline timescale suggest a low-mass ejection from a massive WD with M_(WD) ≳ 1.2 M_⊙. We present an unprecedented view of the early spectroscopic evolution of such an event. Three spectra prior to the peak reveal a complex, multicomponent outflow giving rise to internal collisions and shocks in the ejecta of an He/N-class nova. We identify a coincident IR-variable counterpart in the extensive preeruption coverage of the transient location and infer the presence of a symbiotic progenitor system with an O-rich asymptotic-giant-branch donor star, as well as evidence for an earlier UV-bright outburst in 2014. We suggest that AT 2019qyl is analogous to the subset of Galactic recurrent novae with red-giant companions such as RS Oph and other embedded nova systems like V407 Cyg. Our observations provide new evidence that internal shocks between multiple, distinct outflow components likely contribute to the generation of the shock-powered emission from such systems.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 February 18; revised 2021 June 25; accepted 2021 July 12; published 2021 October 21. This paper includes data gathered with the 6.5 m Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. We thank the anonymous referee for their detailed and thoughtful comments, which helped us improve the clarity of this paper. We also thank E. Aydi for insightful discussions. We would like to thank Jorge Anais Vilchez, Abdo Campillay, Yilin Kong Riveros, and Natalie Ulloa for their help with Swope observations. We also thank the Magellan observers of Las Campanas Observatory and A. Monson for help with the Baade/FourStar data. Research by S.V. is supported by NSF grants AST1813176 and AST-2008108. Support for HST program GO-15151 was provided by NASA through a grant from STScI. Research by D.J.S. is supported by NSF grants AST-1821967, AST-1821987, AST-1813708, AST-1813466, and AST-1908972, as well as by the Heising-Simons Foundation under grant #2020-1864. H.E.B. and M.M.K. acknowledge support from Program number AR-15005, provided by NASA through grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. P.A.W. and S.M. acknowledge funding from the South African National Research Foundation. The UCSC team is supported in part by NASA grant NNG17PX03C, NSF grant AST-1815935, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and by a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to R.J.F. R.D.G. was supported, in part, by the United States Air Force. D.A.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant DGE1339067. C.C.N. acknowledges support from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) Taiwan under grant 104-2923-M-008-004-MY5. This work is part of the research program VENI, with project number 016.192.277, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 730890. This material reflects only the authors' views, and the Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory (GS-2019B-Q-125), a program of NSF's NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). Some of the observations reported in this paper were obtained with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). The SALT observations presented here were made through Rutgers University program 2019-1-MLT-004 (PI: Jha); this research at Rutgers is supported by NSF award AST-1615455. This publication has made use of data collected at Lulin Observatory, partly supported by MoST grant 108-2112-M-008-001. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. This research is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 526555. These observations are associated with program(s) GO-15151, GO-9492, and GO-13743. This work is based in part on archival data obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. This research was made possible through the use of the AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS), funded by the Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund and NSF AST-1412587. 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. This research has made use of the SVO Filter Profile Service (http://svo2.cab.inta-csic.es/theory/fps/) supported from the Spanish MINECO through grant AYA2017-84089. The national facility capability for SkyMapper has been funded through ARC LIEF grant LE130100104 from the Australian Research Council, awarded to the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University of Technology, Monash University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. SkyMapper is owned and operated by The Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The survey data were processed and provided by the SkyMapper Team at ANU. The SkyMapper node of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO) is hosted at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). Development and support the SkyMapper node of the ASVO has been funded in part by Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL) and the Australian Government through the Commonwealth's Education Investment Fund (EIF) and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), particularly the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) and the Australian National Data Service Projects (ANDS). Facilities: CTIO:PROMPT - Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, LCOGT (Sinistro) - , Swope (CCD) - , LO:1m - , Keck:II (NIRES) - , Gemini:South (GMOS) - , SALT (RSS) - , FTN (FLOYDS) - , NOT (ALFOSC) - , HST (WFC3) - , Spitzer (IRAC) - , Swift (UVOT) - , Magellan:Baade (FourStar). - Software: AstroDrizzle (Hack et al. 2012, http://drizzlepac.stsci.edu) DOLPHOT (Dolphin 2000, 2016), IRAF (Tody 1986, 1993), Gemini IRAF package (http://www.gemini.edu/sciops/data-and-results/processing-software), PyRAF (http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/pyraf), Spextool (Cushing et al. 2004; Vacca et al. 2003), PypeIt (Prochaska et al. 2020a, 2020b, https://pypeit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), BANZAI (McCully et al. 2018, https://github.com/LCOGT/banzai), lcogtsnpipe (Valenti et al. 2016, https://github.com/LCOGT/lcogtsnpipe), photpipe (Rest et al. 2005), HEAsoft (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/heasoft/), pysynphot (https://pysynphot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), BBFit (https://github.com/nblago/utils/blob/master/src/model/BBFit.py), emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013, https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/).

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