Bibcode
Lee, C.-H.; Riffeser, A.; Seitz, S.; Bender, R.; Fliri, J.; Hopp, U.; Ries, C.; Bärnbantner, O.; Gössl, C.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 537, id.A43
Advertised on:
1
2012
Journal
Citations
15
Refereed citations
14
Description
We present light curves from the novae detected in the long-term, M
31-monitoring WeCAPP project. The goal of WeCAPP is to constrain the
compact dark matter fraction of the M 31 halo with microlensing
observations. As a by product we detected 91 novae benefiting from the
high cadence and highly sensitive difference imaging technique required
for pixel-lensing. We thus can now present the largest sample of
optical/CCD nova lightcurves towards M 31 to date. We also obtained
thorough coverage of the light curve before and after the eruption
thanks to the long-term monitoring. We apply a nova taxonomy to our nova
candidates and found 29 S-class novae, 10 C-class novae, 2 O-class
novae, and 1 J-class nova. We investigated a universal decline law on
the S-class novae. In addition, we correlated our catalogue with the
literature and found 4 potential recurrent novae. Part of our catalogue
has been used to search for optical counterparts of the super soft X-ray
sources detected in M 31. Optical surveys like WeCAPP, when coordinated
with multi-wavelength observation, will continue to shed light on the
underlying physical mechanism of novae in the future.