Darby » April 8th, 2015, 8:44 am wrote:Ok, magnitude on the teapot nova has dropped into the 6's, and color spectra is shifting towards red, so that looks like the beginnings of fusion flameout to me.
The attachment teapotnova.jpg is no longer available
EDIT: A new
article (8-Apr-2015) over at Sky & Telescope seems to agree.
Today's a slow day, so I went back and re-ran the light chart for the teapot nova, imaged it, and posted it here ...
To my untrained eye, it looks like a series of cyclical mini-novas as the debris from the big nova back in march periodically re-accreted then re-exploded under renewed pressure and temperature, and that each cycle got progressively weaker until the whole thing flamed out in june and slowly collapsed/accreted until it reached an even lower state, after which some weak energy output resumed and has since slowly taped off at around magnitude 9. It'll probably stay there for another century or so until enough additional accretion occurs to restart the whole chain of events. I havent searched out and read what the experts have been saying since last I posted to this thread, but that's my take on it.
I'm somewhat reminded of the annual floods of the Zambezi in Africa ... an annual cycle between lush swampy grassland and parched desert across an enormous area. Here, instead, we have a stellar remnant that every hundred years or slow blows up, flares a half dozen more times in succession, then goes back to sleep to start it all over again.