Suggested Stellar Transients

Transients that were suggested as Novae or Supernovae

In the 1930s, Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky developed the hypothesis of stars that end their lifes in big explosions: supernovae. Only in the 1960s, in a series of three papers by Robert Krafft, the physical nature of novae was explained as surface eruptions on white dwarf stars in cataclysmic binary systems.

However, the term "nova" or "stella nova" was introduced by Tycho Brahe 1572 without any knowledge of the physics in stars, but just from the visual observation of a star seemingly appearing and vanishing after a while, but remaining at the same place (unlike comets). For European astronomy, this doubtless observation required a new category or label for the appearance. In contrast, East Asian astronomers already had a label for it: "guest star". Yet, this term was also used for objects of other physical nature and visual appearance, such as comets. Hence, the historical terms never imply any specific type of object.

Since the dawn of systematic research on variable stars in the 19th century, Sinologists and astrophysicists have attempted to compile catalogues of these objects historically called "nova" (not necessarily implying an underlying nova in the definition of astrophysics) or "guest star". Here, we collated the most famous suggestions from astrophysics papers, comment on them, and create more detailled entries for the interesting ones.