CP Puppis
nova
CP Puppis (or Nova Puppis 1942) was a bright nova occurring in the constellation Puppis in 1942.
The nova was discovered on 9 November 1942 by Bernhard Dawson at La Plata, Argentina, when it had an apparent visual magnitude of about 2. It was independently discovered at 18:00 on 10 November 1942 (UT) by a 19-year-old Japanese schoolgirl, Kuniko Sofue, who looked at the sky after patching her socks and noticed the nova. For this discovery, asteroid 7189 Kuniko was named in her honor.
From a 17th magnitude star, it reached an apparent visual magnitude of –0.2 then began a rapid decline. It had dropped by three magnitudes in an interval of 6.5 days, one of the sharpest declines ever noted for a nova. About 14 years later, the shell ejected by the nova event was detected, which allowed the distance to be computed. In 2000, this distance was revised to 3,720 light-years (1,140 parsecs) after correcting for probable errors. The Gaia spacecraft later measured the parallax of the star leading to an accurate distance of 815+15−14 parsecs.
The nova outburst can be explained by a white dwarf that is accreting matter from a companion; most likely a low-mass main sequence star.
“CP Puppis” enters the record as nova. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Puppis and nova can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “CP Puppis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.