Wild Stars- Day Four

Now that it is done, I am feeling a mix of relief and sadness. Relief- because four days of intensive research results presented session after session is like cramming a semester's worth of astronomy into your brain in four days. Sadness- because I could take maybe one more day, just to finish meeting and talking with some of the people I really wanted to talk to one on one. There just wasn't enough time. I think this was the most worthwhile, well-organized and relevant conference I have ever attended.

I'm not knocking any of the organizers of variable star meetings I've been to in the past, but this was all about CVs, all the rock stars of CV research were here, and I had back stage passes. It was frakkin' cool. The last day of the conference was all about things I am interested in- TOADs, Recurrent Novae and Classical Novae.

The talks of the day were also book-ended by two impressive astronomers from Japan's VSNET, Daisaku Nogami and Izumi Hachisu.

First thing in the morning session Daisaku Nogami presented impressive results of the superoutburst evolution of three very interesting CVs- WZ Sge, GW Lib and V455 And. These are three of the most significant outbursts of dwarf novae in the last couple years and Nogami had it all nailed down. The following talks on GW Lib and V455 And were almost redundant after the impressive amount of optical photometric and spectroscopic information Daisaku presented first thing in the morning.

The last talk of the morning session was about the source of negative superhumps, by Michele Montgomery. I had the pleasure of meeting her and talking for an hour or so Tuesday night, at the NOAO reception. She is an excellent presenter and had a great talk, chock full of teasers about her upcoming publication.

You just have to be intrigued by a woman who can teach you all about the minimum accretion disk tilt needed to generate negative superhumps in light curves, the parameters that affect negative superhump signal strength, and the location in the disk that contributes to this phenomena. That is sexy stuff!

Not to dismiss the other presenters who talked about classical novae and recurrent novae after lunch, but Brad Schaefer stole the show with his talk. Brad does not need a microphone to be heard in a room of 200 people. He is enthusiastic and knowledgeable about his topic, recurrent novae, and he knows how to work a room.

Some of the most exciting news from Brad were previously undiscovered eruptions of RN in past years. He and his graduate assistant relentlessly scoured all the archival data in the world to find plates and observations of recurrent novae outbursts. They found three eruptions of U Sco (1917, 1945, 1969) RS Oph in 1907, V2487 Oph in 1900 and CI Aql in 1941.

From these intensive searches, and modeling the results, Brad is able to make some bold predictions about the timing of future eruptions. In the next decade he predicts no less than five recurrent novae eruptions- V2487 Oph, V394 CrA, V745 Sco V3890 Sgr and the one he is most excited about U Sco. U Sco is predicted to erupt in 2009.3, which is RIGHT NOW!
After lunch we were shown amazing results of x-ray observations of recurrent novae and novae. There is a lot of interest in novae eruptions by professionals, more than I realized. What's more, they are making x-ray observations of these objects months and years after the initial outburst in an attempt to observe just when the accretion disk reforms and accretion begins again and what happens at this phase of the outburst.

From this I realized, amateurs need to follow many of these objects for much longer than we typically do as best we can. The AAVSO light curves sort of peter out after six months or so, and rarely is there much follow-up when a star reappears from solar conjunction. It's like we've all forgotten about them and moved on to the next big thing. Unfortunately, this is about the time they become really interesting to professionals, and from what I was seeing there may be some very interesting observational phenomena we are totally missing, like sudden rebrightenings of the systems or flickering. Amateur CV sleuths take note!One of the final talks of the conference was from Izumi Hachisu. He presented the methodology and results of his search for a relationship between the t3 time of decay (the 3 magnitude decay time from optical maximum) and the turn-on and turn-off times of supersoft x-ray emission. He presented detailed light curve analysis of classical novae detected in x-rays, and proposed best fit models that reproduce the optical and supersoft x-ray observations. If all that sounds impressive, you're right, it was. The fact that most of the data was collected with relatively small telescopes makes it that much more impressive.

That's about all I can dig out of my CV overloaded memory and notes at this point. I'm going to let this all digest for a day or two and write a summary review. I know I am looking forward to the next CV conference, which is planned for 2010 in Kyoto, Japan!

Simo Slacker!

As promised, the interviews I did with five astronomers at the Wild Stars in the Old West II conference are now coming online, thanks to my friends at Slacker Astronomy, Michael Koppelman and Doug Welch. The first part of the series is now available.

The first interview in this episode is with Brad Schaefer from LSU. Brad is very excited about the results of his research on recurrent novae. These cataclysmic variables grab our attention and spark our imaginations because of the incredible amplitude of their outbursts, typically 8-12 magnitudes, and the rarity of these spectacular events. Many of these outbursts are once-in-a-lifetime events. Like an apparition of Halley's comet, witnessing an outburst of T CrB twice in a lifetime would be a matter of uncommon luck, longevity or both.

Artist's depiction of the recurrent nova, RS Ophiuchi, in outburst.
(Illustration Credit & Copyright: David A. Hardy & PPARC; Astronomy Picture of the Day 2006 July 26).

I've written about recurrent novae before. The cause of a nova eruption is a thermonuclear reaction on the surface of the white dwarf. After years of mass exchange between the binary pair, temperature and pressure at the surface of the white dwarf build sufficiently to cause the layer of accreted material to explode like a hydrogen bomb. This bomb, however, can have the mass of 30 Earths! Once the temperature becomes high enough, this layer begins to expand. Minutes into the process the shell can be radiating at 100,000 solar luminosities and expanding outwards at 3000 km/s. Eventually the shell envelopes the entire binary and the orbital motion of the pair acts like a propeller to whip things up. After 1000 days or so the envelope expands to the point it can be seen as nebulosity surrounding the pair. Over hundreds of years the shell dissipates into the interstellar medium.

Most novae probably erupt more than once in their lifetime, with the mass of the white dwarf determining the amount of accreted material that needs to accumulate before triggering on outburst. Systems with a white dwarf of 0.6 solar masses might take as long as 5 million years between eruptions. A system with a 1.3 solar mass white dwarf might only take 30,000 years between eruptions. Systems with recurrence times of 100 years or less probably have very massive white dwarf primaries.

With so few known examples and the rarity of these events it is no wonder that recurrent novae eruptions are extremely interesting to astronomers. Monitoring these stars for outbursts over decades of relative inactivity is still one of the extremely valuable contributions visual observers can provide to science.

The second interview is with Steve Howell, of NOAO. Steve and I talked about the advances that have been made in CV research since the last Wild Stars meeting ten years ago. I also asked him where he thinks new research is heading.

But, I have to admit, I really wanted to talk to him about his awesome image of magnetic accretion. I saw this in his poster presentation at the meeting and was blown away by the whole concept of the complicated, beautiful way mass is accreted in polars.

Image credit: S. Howell / P. Marenfeld/NOAO

I hope you enjoy the podcast. My sincere thanks to Michael, Doug, Brad and Steve for making these Simo-interviews possible.

T Pyxidis: The Story That Just Won't Die

Normally I wouldn't do this, but this story has propagated itself so widely through the internet and blogosphere I feel I have to chime in, if for no other reason than to help set the record straight. So what you are about to read is a story about a Tweet about a blog, about a blog, about the other blog, about several news articles, about a press release, about a research paper about...a variable star.

Artists image of the recurrent nova RS Oph

Credit: David Hardy/PPARC

It all started last week when Edward Sion and his team from Villanova announced results of research they had done on the recurrent nova, T Pyxidis. Among other things, they claimed this recurrent nova may be at or near the tipping point in its evolution, and that it will someday (soon) become a supernova. They also re-estimated the distance to T Pyx as being much closer than thought before, approximately 3300 light years distant. Then the misinformation bomb was dropped, as the last bit of their press release states:

"...gamma radiation emitted by the supernova would fry the Earth, dumping as much gamma radiation (~100,000 erg/square centimeter) into our planet, which is equivalent to the gamma ray input of 1000 solar flares simultaneously."

Even though these claims were disputed at the press conference by other supernovae experts in attendance, namely Alex Filippenko, the genie was out of the bottle and before you could say, "Wait, you don't understand!", the popular press was claiming the end of the world was near.

The Daily Telegraph ran with the headline Earth 'to be wiped out' by supernova explosion, The Sun ran The death star, and bloggers began trying to undo the damage. Unfortunately, they managed to splurt out some erroneous or misleading information of their own.

First, let me begin by saying, astronomers do not really know for sure what the progenitors of supernovae explosions are. We have some very convincing arguments and theories, but there are still entire astronomical conferences held on this subject each year, presenting differing points of view based on new observations and models.

The main reason they are so interesting to astronomers is because type 1A supernovae are used as standard candles to determine the distances to galaxies too far away to estimate their distance any other way. All of our theories on the history and future of the Universe are based largely on measurements of galaxies at high redshifts. The whole theory of the acceleration of the expansion of space is based on galaxies not behaving as predicted, based on measurements of distance based on...you guessed it, type 1A supernovae measurements.

The connection between supernovae and recurrent novae is not firmly established. Yes, they MAY be part of the population of progenitor systems that eventually become supernovae, but we don't know this for sure. If they are, well that makes them a much more interesting type of variable star, which also makes it easier to obtain observing time on a space telescope, or a grant to do research on them. So for those studying recurrent novae this is a convenient connection to try to make. After all, refining the cosmological distance scale and the expansion of the Universe, and how that relates to dark matter and dark energy are some of the hot, sexy topics in astronomical research these days.

Claiming a supernova could release as much gamma radiation as Scion and colleagues claimed is factually incorrect. Phil Plait does an excellent job of explaining the relative damages a supernova or a gamma-ray burst in our galaxy could do to the Earth in his book 'Death From the Skies', and a supernova explosion at that distance has no chance of damaging our planet.

Unfortunately, Phil did manage to get some of the facts about recurrent novae wrong in his blog rebuffing Scion's claims when he wrote, "Lots of recurrent novae are known, and are fairly well understood."

Not exactly. The currently known recurrent novae are T Pyx, IM Nor, CI Aql, V2487 Oph, U Sco, V394 CrA, T CrB, RS Oph, V745 Sco, and V3890 Sgr. That is only ten stars. Out of the billions of stars in our galaxy, thousands of known cataclysmic variables and hundreds of known galactic novae, ten are known to be recurrent novae. Recurrent novae, like R CrB type stars are actually quite a rare phenomena, as far as we know.

If they were fairly well understood, the definitive paper to date on the subject of their history and behavior, Comprehensive Photometric Histories of All Known Galactic Recurrent Novae by Bradley E. Schaefer, would not still be asking at its heart: What is the death rate of RNe in our galaxy, are the white dwarfs gaining or losing mass over each eruption cycle, and whether or not RNe can be the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae.

Given a little time to reconsider what he wrote, I'm sure Phil would change that sentence. On the other hand, I have to give him credit for coining one of 2010's leading candidates for 'best skeptical science phrase' when he came up with "disaster-porn".

"There was no need to disaster-porn this release up the way it was done. Recurrent novae and Type Ia supernovae are fascinating, well worth our attention for any number of reasons including of course their potential danger."

My friend, Ian O'Neill, has commented on this situation also, on the Discovery Space News and AstroEngine.

The last bit of misinformation that really needs to be adrressed before leaving this subject, is the notion that any of this will happen any time soon. The title of the press release, "The long overdue recurrent nova T Pyxidis: soon to be a Type 1A supernova", was as misleading as the facts presented.

Soon on human, everyday-guy-on-the-street terms, means this week or this year. When astronomers use the word 'soon' or the phrase 'in a short time' they can and do usually mean tens of thousands or millions of years. Not much at all happens soon with recurrent novae, that is one of the reasons we know so little about them. Recurrent nova eruptions happen on human time scales of decades or possibly once per 100 years. To astronomers these are relatively short time scales, as compared to the thousands or millions of years between classical nova eruptions or the billions of years it takes for most stars to evolve and show any change at all. But that means that since we've been paying attention and monitoring the sky with cameras and telescopes keeping records, we've only seen these recurrent novae go into outburst a few times in history.

In fact, if you now the story of T Pyx, you know that one of the things that makes it interesting is the fact that it is overdue for a recurrent novae outburst. If it had kept to its usual pattern it would have already erupted some time ago. But if you read the Schaefer paper, he explains that T Pyx is actually evolving into a new type system and may not erupt again for hundreds of years, and "soon" won't be a recurrent nova at all.

"We now realize that what has happened is that the T Pyx accretion rate dropped substantially soon after the time of the last eruption, so it will be a long time until the next eruption (Schaefer 2005). Indeed, a more detailed accounting that includes the recent declines since 2005 plus the associated larger trigger mass implies that T Pyx won�t erupt for many centuries (Schaefer et al. 2009). Also, with the likely continuing decline in accretion, T Pyx will soon be going into hibernation, and thus will not suffer any further RN events for almost a million years (Schaefer et al. 2009). That is, T Pyx has stopped being a recurrent nova."

Recurrent novae are rare and beautiful beasts in the cataclysmic variable zoo. Their eruptions and behavior are interesting enough to garner our attention. There really is no need to "disaster-porn" their stories to make them interesting to the astronomical community or the public.

Brad Schaefer is a very enthusiastic and engaging speaker. If you haven't heard this before, check out my interview with him on Slacker Astronomy where we talk about recurrent novae, and T Pyx.

U Sco: Long Anticipated Eruption Has Begun

Today, two amateur astronomers from Florida detected a rare outburst of the recurrent nova U Scorpii, which set in motion satellite observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, Swift and Spitzer. The last outburst of U Scorpii occurred in February of 1999. Observers around the planet will now be observing this remarkable system intensely for the next few months trying to unlock the mysteries of white dwarfs, interacting binaries, accretion and the progenitors of Type IA supernovae.

Artists rendition of recurrent nova RS Oph 

Image credit: David Hardy and PPARC

One of the remarkable things about this outburst is it was predicted in advance by Dr. Bradley Schaefer, Louisiana State University, so observers of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) have been closely monitoring the star since last February, waiting to detect the first signs of an eruption. This morning, AAVSO observers, Barbara Harris and Shawn Dvorak sent in notification of the outburst, sending astronomers scrambling to get �target of opportunity observations� from satellites and continuous coverage from ground-based observatories. Time is a critical element, since U Sco is known to reach maximum light and start to fade again in one day.

There are only ten known recurrent novae (RNe). This, coupled with the fact that eruptions may occur only once every 10-100 years, makes observations of this rare phenomenon extremely interesting to astronomers. Recurrent novae are close binary stars where matter is accreting from the secondary star onto the surface of a white dwarf primary. Eventually this material accumulates enough to ignite a thermonuclear explosion that makes the nova eruption. �Classical novae� are systems where only one such eruption has occurred in recorded history. They may indeed have recurrent eruptions, but these may occur thousands or millions of years apart. RNe have recurrence times of 10-100 years.

The difference is thought to be the mass of the white dwarf. The white dwarf must be close to the Chandrasekhar limit, 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. This higher mass makes for a higher surface gravity, which allows a relatively small amount of matter to reach the ignition point for a thermonuclear runaway. White dwarfs in RNe are thought to be roughly 1.2 times solar, or greater. The rate at which mass is accreted onto the white dwarf must be relatively high also. This is the only way to get enough material accumulated onto the white dwarf in such a short time, as compared to classical novae.

Recurrent novae are of particular interest to scientists because they may represent a stage in the evolution of close binary systems on their way to becoming Type IA supernovae. As mass builds up on the white dwarf they may eventually reach the tipping point, the Chandrasekhar limit. Once a white dwarf exceeds this mass it will collapse into a Type IA supernova.

A problem with this theory is the mass that is blown off the white dwarf in the eruption. If more mass is ejected during an eruption than has accreted during the previous interval between eruptions, the white dwarf will not be gaining mass and will not collapse into a Type IA supernovae. Therefore, scientists are eager to obtain all the data they can on these eruptions to determine what is happening with the white dwarf, the mass that is ejected and the rate of accretion.

 Observations from amateur astronomers are requested by the AAVSO. Data from backyard telescopes will be combined with data from mountaintop observatories and space telescopes to help unravel the secrets of these rare systems. AAVSO finder charts with comparison star sequences are available at: http://www.aavso.org/observing/charts/vsp/index.html?pickname=U%20Sco

Amateur Astronomers Alert the World to a Rare Stellar Eruption

Barbara had gone to bed late and really didn�t feel like getting up this morning, but her dog had other ideas. So she reluctantly got out of bed to let the dog out, and like every other clear morning this month, she fired up the telescope and CCD and pointed toward U Scorpii.

When the first image appeared on her computer there was a huge over exposed star right in the middle of the field. Barbara couldn�t believe her eyes. In fact, she didn�t believe her eyes. Just yesterday she had measured U Sco at 18.2V. She quickly took another much shorter exposure, double-checked the position, �and that�s when I started to get excited�, she said.

Dr. Barbara Harris, an amateur astronomer, had been monitoring the recurrent nova, U Sco, for months, in anticipation of a rare eruption that had been predicted by Dr. Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University. Barbara and many other observers, participating in a campaign coordinated by the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) had begun monitoring U Sco in February 2009. Now on a clear, clam morning in Florida, the moment had arrived!

�Back in December, I had gotten an email from Brad Schaefer, because I had obtained the first image of U Sco as it came out from behind the Sun�, explained Barbara. The image had helped astronomers determine that U Sco had not gone into outburst while it was in conjunction with the Sun. �They were sure that it hadn�t gone into outburst, so he emailed me and thanked me, and said, keep submitting your data to AAVSO, but here�s my home phone number. Call me right away if you get something!�

Barb submitted her observation to AAVSO, looked up Brad�s telephone number, and then thought to herself, �Let me take one more image just to be sure. I don�t want to call him this early and wake him up if I�m not sure.� At this point, it was about 5:30 AM EST. So she took another image, calibrated and measured, removed all doubt from her mind, and called Brad Schaefer.

Just on the other side of Orlando, Shawn Dvorak was just waking up to go to the gym. His telescope had been running all night taking data on several variable stars he was monitoring for AAVSO. Shawn had also begun monitoring U Sco again in January, as it peeked out from behind the Sun. It was usually his last observation in the morning, rising high enough to observe just before dawn.

�I almost didn't observe it this morning since I was planning to go to the gym. I'm glad I did!� Shawn wasn�t quite awake yet, and when the first CCD image came up, he thought to himself, �whoa, I'm pointing at the wrong field, there's no star that bright here�. Shawn said, �Barbara Harris spotted the outburst about an hour earlier but I hadn't heard about it yet, so it was quite a surprise to me when I saw this �new� star�. Thinking the telescope had somehow missed the target; he re-imaged the field to convince himself. He then took a series of shorter exposures, so the erupting 8th magnitude star wouldn�t be saturated on the CCD, and kept taking them for the next fifteen minutes as dawn quickly approached.

About this time, the phone rang in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and half-awake, Brad Schaefer lifted the phone to his ear. It was Barbara Harris, telling him U Scorpii was in outburst. � He let out a scream and said thank you, thank you! I�ll start notifying everyone right away�, Barb recalled.

U Sco outburst discovery image: Barbara Harris

Dr. Schaefer has been studying recurrent novae for years, collecting a large database of observations of all the known recurrent novae. His bold prediction that U Sco was going to erupt in 2009.3 plus or minus one year, was the basis for the intensive monitoring campaign by the AAVSO, and was widely publicized as well as published in his recent paper, �Comprehensive Photometric Histories of All Known Recurrent Novae�. As U Sco approached conjunction with the Sun in the fall of 2009 and still hadn�t gone into outburst, astronomers everywhere started to get anxious.

When it erupts, U Sco goes from minimum to maximum, then to one magnitude below peak, in under one day. This makes responding to the first sign of an outburst, and pointing large earth and space-based telescopes in time to cover the early parts of an eruption, a daunting task. At 6AM EST, Dr. Schaefer was on the phone and emailing people to notify observatories and space telescopes the moment had finally come.

At 6:15 AM EST, Dr. Matthew Templeton, observing campaign coordinator for the AAVSO, was just stepping out of the shower when he noticed a voice mail on his phone. Before his hair was dry, a confirmation of the outburst from Shawn Dvorak had been submitted to AAVSO. Matt swung into action, and by 6:45 the first �AAVSO Special Notice� had been sent, alerting observers around the world to begin observing the long anticipated eruption of U Sco.

At 1:30 PM, six hours after Barbara Harris had first detected the outburst, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) and the INTREGAL (INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) satellites were observing U Sco in x-rays and gamma rays. Observations from Hawaii and New Zealand were reported and the international campaign to observe U Sco in outburst had begun in earnest. Over the next several months, astronomers will be monitoring the progress of this outburst at nearly all wavelengths of light from radio waves to X-rays using ground-based telescopes and space-borne observatories.

Dr. Arne Henden, Director of the AAVSO, commented, "This again shows the real advantage of the worldwide distribution of amateur astronomers for detecting transient events like this.  Harris and Dvorak could watch U Sco rise over the Atlantic, hours before professional astronomers in the Western U.S. would have a chance.  Then, because of the winter weather for most U.S. professional observatories, amateurs continued monitoring U Sco from New Zealand and Australia, catching the important first hours of the outburst."

Just think; astronomers may have missed the beginning of the eruption entirely if Shawn had decided to go to the gym, or Barb�s dog hadn�t barked and gotten her out of bed. �My dog has been getting cookies and anything he wants all day�, said Barb.

The progress of the U Scorpii outburst can be followed via the AAVSO, who are maintaining a web page devoted to the event, and anyone can view observational data as they are submitted in real time through the AAVSO website.

For more information on U Scorpii and the AAVSO campaign, please visit
http://www.aavso.org/news/usco.shtml, or contact Dr. Matthew Templeton
at matthewt@aavso.org or via telephone at +1 (617) 354-0484.

Unprecedented Eruption Catches Astronomers By Surprise

An alert was raised March 11 when Japanese amateur astronomers announced what might have been the discovery of a new 8th magnitude nova in the constellation of Cygnus. It was soon realized that this eruption was not what it appeared to be. It was actually the unexpected nova-like eruption of a known variable star, V407 Cygni. Typically varying between 12th and 14th magnitude, V407 Cyg is a rather mundane variable star. So what caused this well-behaved star to suddenly go ballistic?

Artist rendering of a symbiotic recurrent nova. Image credit: David A. Hardy & PPARC

V407 Cyg is a symbiotic variable. These are close, interacting binary pairs usually containing a red giant and a hotter, smaller white dwarf. They orbit a common center of gravity inside a shared nebulosity. A typical symbiotic variable consists of an M type giant transferring matter to a hot white dwarf via its stellar wind. This wind is ionized by the white dwarf, giving rise to the symbiotic nebula.

Symbiotic variables are complex systems with many sources of variability. They can vary periodically due to the binary motion, the red giant can vary due to pulsation, the stars may be obscured by circumstellar dust, or the light emitted my change due to the formation of giant star spots.

The white dwarf component may glow more or less constantly as it accretes material from the red giant and heats it up at a steady rate, or the material may form an accretion disk around the white dwarf, like in dwarf novae. Mass accreted onto the white dwarf can result in flickering and quasi-periodic oscillations. If there is a sudden increase in the rate of accretion, or the material in the accretion disk reaches a point of instability and crashes down onto the surface of the white dwarf the symbiotic system may undergo a nova-like eruption.

About 20% of symbiotics consist of a Mira-type variable as the giant of the pair. These binaries reside in much dustier envelopes. V407 Cyg is one of these dusty, Mira-type symbiotics. Its typical variation of a few magnitudes is due mainly to the pulsation of the Mira component of the system. Astronomers had never before witnessed a nova-like outburst of this interacting binary. You can imagine their surprise when Japanese amateurs, searching for novae along the galactic plane, suddenly detected this mild mannered, dusty Mira, symbiotic variable glowing nearly 100 times brighter than ever before.

That was just the beginning of the story. The first new spectra taken of the system, on March 13th, was different from any ever recorded for this star or any other symbiotic Mira variable in outburst. The normal absorption spectra of the Mira star was completely overwhelmed by the blue continuum of the outbursting white dwarf. The characteristics of the emission spectra revealed two distinct types of activity. One was the relatively slow ionized wind of the Mira star. The other looked like the fast expanding ejecta of a nova outburst. In fact, the spectrum looked remarkably similar to the symbiotic recurrent novae, RS Ophiuchi.

Typical outbursts of known symbiotic binaries, and symbiotic Miras in particular, usually exhibit a very slow rise to maximum, taking months, and no real significant mass ejection. This appears to be a much more quickly evolving and violent event, more like the eruptions of the recurrent novae RS Oph and T CrB. V407 Cyg may join this rare class of symbiotic recurrent novae.

As if that weren�t enough, another twist was added to the story on March 19th, when the Large Area Telescope (LAT), on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope may have detected the star in gamma-rays, something never observed in a symbiotic system before. The gamma-rays could be caused by shock driven acceleration of the ejected material, and its capture by strong magnetic fields within the system.

Unlike many novae and recurrent novae outbursts, this eruption may last for weeks or months and the variation in light output could be quite complex and interesting. Because the giant secondary is losing mass, the system is likely to have a large amount of circumstellar material. The ejected shell from the nova explosion on the white dwarf will interact with this material as the shell propagates outward, and will likely produce a wide variety of variable phenomena.

V407 Cyg has our attention now, and professional and amateur astronomers will be keeping a close eye on it from now on.