Weird ancient burst of light in the sky turns out to be a nova
A 25-year hunt for a bright spot in the sky first seen almost six centuries ago has turned up a nova - and answered a long-standing question about this unique type of exploding star. We now have a better idea of what they do between more intense periods of activity. Royal astronomers working in the court of King Sejong the Great of Korea noticed something unusual shining in the sky on 11 March 1437. "A guest star began to be seen between the second and third stars of Wei," an astronomer recorded - Wei being a collection of nine stars in the tail of the constellation Scorpius. "It lasted for 14 days." Read more
Title: Nova Scorpius 1437 A.D. is now a dwarf nova, age-dated by its proper motion Author: Michael M. Shara, Krystian Ilkiewicz, Joanna Mikolajewska, Ashley Pagnotta, Michael F. Bode, Lisa A. Crause, Katarzyna Drozd, Jacqueline K. Faherty, Irma Fuentes-Morales, Jonathan E. Grindlay, Anthony F. J. Moffat, Linda Schmidtobreick, F. Richard Stephenson, Claus Tappert, David Zurek
Here we report the recovery of the binary underlying the classical nova of 11 March 1437 A.D. whose age is independently confirmed by proper motion-dating, and show that in the 20th century it exhibits dwarf nova eruptions. The four oldest recovered classical novae are now all dwarf novae. Taken together they strongly suggest that mass transfer rates decrease by an order of magnitude or more in the centuries after a classical nova event, greatly slowing the evolution, and lengthening the lifetimes of these explosive binary stars.