The frequency distribution of the height above the Galactic plane for the novae

Abstract

In order to examine the hypothesis of the existence of two different kinds of nova populations in the Galaxy - 'disk' novae and 'bulge' novae - the frequency distribution in the z-direction was obtained for 64 novae. The fact that large number of fast novae related to disk novae are found at a significant distance from the Galactic plane (up to z~3700 pc) can't result from photometric measurements errors. Slow novae considered to belong to bulge novae show more close concentration to the Galactic plane (z<1700 pc). A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test run on the data showed that the two populations hypothesis probability amounts to 95.56%.

11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table