Speaker
Description
One of the great surprises from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is the discovery that classical novae are sources of GeV gamma-ray emission. Despite the low velocities (~few thousand km/s) and low masses (~$10^{-5}$ solar masses) of their ejecta, these explosions still manage to produce populations of relativistic particles. The ENova team studies classical novae at all available wavelengths. Here, we present new discoveries from our observations with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Swift, Chandra, NuSTAR, and (of course) Fermi. Fermi and optical monitoring uncover correlation between the optical and gamma-ray light curves, indicating the optical light is reprocessed emission from shocks and favoring the hadronic model for gamma-ray emission. Swift and VLA monitoring reveal evidence for multiple shocks in some novae. HST and VLA imaging point to a misalignment between optical and radio structures in at least one nova. NuSTAR observations provide new information about the hard X-ray regime, beginning to fill in the previously un-observable gap between Swift/Chandra and Fermi. Exciting new projects are underway or planned on all of these instruments.
