On Super-Novae

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Abstract
Communicated March 19, 1934 The extensive investigations of extragalactic systems during recent years have brought to light the remarkable fact that there exist two well-defined types of new stars or novae which might be distinguished as common novae and super-novae. No intermediate objects have so far been observed. Common novae seem to be a rather frequent phenomenon in certain stellar systems. Thus, according to Bailey,1 ten to twenty novae flash up every year in our own Milky Way. A similar frequency (30 per year) has been found by Hubble in the well-known Andromeda nebula. A characteristic feature of these common novae is their absolute brightness (M) at maximum, which in the mean is −5.8 with a range of perhaps 3 to 4 mags. The maximum corresponds to 20,000 times the radiation of the sun. During maximum light the common novae therefore belong to the absolutely brightest stars in stellar systems. This is in full agreement with the fact that we have been able to discover this type of novae in other stellar systems near enough for us to reach stars of absolute magnitude −5 with our present optical equipment The novae of the second group (super-novae) presented for a while a very curious puzzle because this type of new star was found, not only in the nearer systems, but apparently all over the accessible range of nebular distances. Moreover, these novae presented the new feature that at their maximum brightness they emit nearly as much light as the whole nebula in which they originate. Since the investigations of Hubble and others have revealed that the absolute total luminosities of extragalactic systems scatter with rather small dispersion around the mean value Mvis = −14.7, there is no doubt that we must attribute to this group of novae an …

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