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

Abstract

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. © 2012 ESO.