The Wendelstein Calar Alto Pixellensing Project (WeCAPP): the M 31 nova catalogue

• Published in: Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin) 2012-01, Vol.537, p.A43
• Main Authors: Lee, C.-H., Riffeser, A., Seitz, S., Bender, R., Fliri, J., Hopp, U., Ries, C., Bärnbantner, O., Gössl, C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astrophysics; cataclysmic variables; galaxies: individual: M 31; novae; Physics
• ISSN: 0004-6361; 1432-0746; 1432-0756
• DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201117068

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.