Dr. Jesús Toalá Sanz - Recent findings on nova explosions
Channel: IAA - Comunicación
Date: 09/10/2020

Nova events are the result of the interaction of low-mass binary systems. A compact white dwarf (WD) accretes material from an old and cold companion until a thermonuclear runaway takes place on its surface. Such explosive events can be considered the scaled-down siblings of supernova (SN) explosions, but its study has many advantages over SNe, as nova events are more numerous (some systems even exhibit recurrent explosions within decades) and their evolution and expansion can be followed in human time-scales. In this talk I will review the most recent findings of our group. I will present a multi-epoch study of a sample of novae from historical archival observations in conjunction with recent ground-based images to characterize the hydrodynamic evolution of nova shells. Finally, I will address our discovery of the first magnetized jet in a classical nova using Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observations.