Getting to know Classical Novae with Swift

Understand

Novae have been reported as transients for more than two thousand years.

• Their bright optical outbursts are the result of explosive nuclear burning of gas accreted from a binary companion onto a white dwarf.
• Novae containing a white dwarf close to the Chandrasekhar mass limit and accreting at a high rate are potentially the unknown progenitors of the type Ia supernovae used to measure the acceleration of the Universe.
• Swift X-ray observations have radically transformed our view of novae by providing dense monitoring throughout the outburst, revealing new phenomena in the super-soft X-rays from the still-burning white dwarf such as early extreme variability and half- to one-minute timescale quasi-periodic oscillations.