2011ATel.3498....1C

The Palomar Transient Factory (Law et al. 2009, Rau et al. 2009) discovered a nova candidate in M31, PTF11fzx, on UT 2011 June 18.50 at RA(J2000)=00:36:15.3, Dec(J2000)=+38:51:31.7. PTF11fzx was R=19.0mag when discovered and fainter than a limiting magnitude of R=20.5 on June 12. The above magnitudes are calibrated to the USNO-B1 catalogue.

Spectra of PTF11fzx were obtained with the Double Beam Spectrograph on the Palomar 200-inch Hale telescope on June 24 and with the Low Resolution Image Spectrometer on the Keck-I telescope on July 2. The P200 spectrum exhibits a blue continuum without prominent Balmer series. The Keck spectrum shows strong Balmer lines (FWHM Halpha ∼800 km/s) which are blueshifted by v~-300 km/s, consistent with M31. The existence of Fe II emission lines are indicative of the Fe II spectroscopic class of classical novae (Williams et al. 1994).

This nova is located about 170 arcmin away from the center of M31. Comparing to the Pietsch 2010 compilation, PTF11fzx is the most distant spectroscopically classified classical nova in M31.