Recurrent Nova M31N 2008-12a: Liverpool Telescope discovery of 6th eruption in 7 years
ATel #6527; M. J. Darnley (LJMU), S. C. Williams (LJMU), M. F. Bode (LJMU), A. W. Shafter (SDSU), M. Henze (ESAC), J.-U. Ness (ESAC), R. A. Hounsell (STSCI)
on 3 Oct 2014; 06:19 UT
Credential Certification: Matt Darnley (M.J.Darnley@ljmu.ac.uk)
Referred to by ATel #: 6532, 6535, 6537, 6540, 6543, 6546, 6558, 6565, 6604, 9848, 11116, 11130, 12177, 12179, 12207, 13269, 13273, 13279, 13290, 14130, 15034
We report the discovery of a sixth eruption of the remarkable (~1 year inter-eruption timescale) M31 recurrent nova M31N 2008-12a, see Darnley et al. (2014), Henze et al. (2014) and Tang et al. (2014).
The Liverpool Telescope (LT; Steele et al. 2004) has been monitoring M31N 2008-12a with a nightly cadence since the end of July 2014. A clear detection of a bright stellar-like source was made in a 60 second Sloan r'-band observation taken on 2014 October 2 21:41 UT. No source has been detected at this position in any of the previous LT observations (since the 2013 eruption, see e.g. ATel #5607, #5611).
The position of this eruption is RA = 0:45:28.81 Dec. = +41:54:09.9, and it was discovered with a magnitude of r' = 15.91 ± 0.02.
We highly recommend multi-wavelength follow-up observations of this important system.
