Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2015

MAY-JUNE 2015 STELLAR EVOLUTION the anomaly represented by that event, but while not excluding different scenarios from those of a classical nova, they essentially supported the latter interpretation, suggest- ing that at the base of it all there was a bi- nary system with transfer of material. Some decades went by, and what in the meantime had been renamed as CK Vul (the combina- tion of two letters followed by the constellation abbrevia- tion is one of the ways used by astronomers to catalogue variable stars) does not undergo further rel- evant investigations, leaving the doubt on what really happened in that patch of sky more than three centuries ago. Maybe it was the outburst of a so-called “slow nova” (like the Nova Aquilae T he eight 6- metre anten- nas which make up the Submilli- meter Array (SMA) located on the dormant vol- cano Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Tomasz Kami ń ski’s team