A new approach to generate a catalogue of potential historical novae

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to identify ancient records of celestial events, specifically classical novae, by carefully analyzing historical descriptions and matching them with modern astronomical objects within defined sky areas.

Contribution

It develops a detailed approach to correlate ancient celestial sightings with modern cataclysmic variables by considering positional uncertainties from historical texts.

Findings

Identified 24 promising ancient nova candidates.

Validated the method with known supernovae, achieving a margin of error up to 4.5 degrees.

Provided a new framework for linking historical records with modern astronomical data.

Abstract

Ancient Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese observers left us records of celestial sightings, the so-called `guest stars' dated up to $\sim2500$ years ago. Their identification with modern observable targets could open interesting insights into the long-term behavior of astronomical objects, as shown by the successful identification of 8 galactic supernovae (SNe). Here we evaluate the possibility to identify ancient classical novae with presently known cataclysmic variables (CVs). For this purpose, we have developed a method which reconsiders in detail positions and sizes of ancient asterisms, in order to define areas on the sky that should be used for a search of modern counterparts. These areas range from a few to several hundred square degrees, depending on the details given in ancient texts; they should replace the single coordinate values given by previous authors. Any appropriate target (CVs, X-ray binaries etc.) within these areas can be considered as a valid candidate for identification with the corresponding ancient event. Based on the original descriptions of several hundred old events, we selected those without movement and without a tail (to exclude comets) and which did not only visible within a certain hour (to exclude meteors). This way, we present a shortlist of 24 most promising events which could refer to classical nova eruptions. Our method is checked by applying it to the known SN identifications, leading to a margin of error between 0 and 4.5 degrees, meaning that some SN remnants lay exactly inside the areas given by the historical reports while in some other cases they are laying at considerable distances.