The Distances to Novae As Seen By Gaia

TL;DR

This paper evaluates various methods for determining nova distances using Gaia data, finding that Gaia parallaxes are most accurate, while traditional methods like MMRD are unreliable and should be discontinued.

Contribution

The study provides a comprehensive assessment of prior nova-distance methods against Gaia parallaxes, highlighting the superiority of Gaia data and the unreliability of traditional techniques.

Findings

Gaia parallaxes are the most accurate nova distance measurements.

Expansion parallaxes have a 1-sigma uncertainty of 0.95 mag in distance modulus.

The MMRD relation is unreliable and should not be used for nova distances.

Abstract

The Gaia spacecraft has just released a large set of parallaxes, including 41 novae for which the fractional error is <30%. I have used these to evaluate the accuracy and bias of the many prior methods for getting nova-distances. The best of the prior methods is the geometrical parallaxes from HST for just four novae, although the real error bars are 3X larger than stated. The canonical method for prior nova-distances has been the expansion parallaxes from the nova shells, but this method is found to have real 1-sigma uncertainty of 0.95 mag in the distance modulus, and the prior quoted error bars are on average 3.6X worse than advertised. The many variations on the maximum-magnitude-rate-of-decline (MMRD) relation are all found to be poor, too poor to be useable, and even to be non-applicable for 5-out-of-7 samples of nova, so the MMRD should no longer be used. The prior method of using various measures of the extinction from the interstellar medium have been notoriously bad, but now a new version by Ozdonmez and coworkers has improved this to an unbiased method with 1-sigma uncertainty of 1.14 mag in the distance modulus. For the future, I recommend in order (1) using the Gaia parallax, (2) using the catalog of Ozdonmez, (3) using M_max = -7.0 +- 1.4 mag as an empirical method of poor accuracy, and (4) if none of these methods is available, then to not use the nova for purposes where a distance is needed.