Aquila novae

[secretchimp]

I've recently been re-reading some older scifi (Gregory Benford, "Across the Sea of Suns", "In the Ocean of Night", etc) In these stories were mentioned the multiple novae in the constellation Aquila. I then did a google search on this and found (http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS01/cs01p22.htm) where there was an article by Arthur C Clark wherein he mentions the Aquila novae as an anomaly that brought to mind an idea for scifi (which was then used by Benford and others): the idea being that the novae there are artificial or a part of a spreading disaster. His question was: Why did 25 percent of the novae in a forty-year period appear in only 0.25 percent of the sky? Is the front line moving in our direction?

Looking into it I am only finding a few references (via google) to one or two novae from Aquila. His question had me wondering what was going on and so here are my questions:

1. Are the stars of Aquila all relatively close together? What I wonder is if they all derived from the same original nebula and are siblings, thus each derives from star systems that are all of roughly the same age and original mass (thus explaining why they all went novae within the short span of time).

2. Are they all binaries? Each a star with a white dwarf companion?

3. If they are all unrelated star systems, was this simply a rare statistical cluster due to multiple dwarf-star binaries all within the same line-of-site but actually fairly far apart (and unrelated)?

 

[kg]

I would put my money on a statiscal anomoly. Of course these were novae that were visible, there were many in the galaxy during the same time that we could not see. Even if these are stars that were born at the same time from the same nursery the time scale of human history nearly nothing compared with the time scale of stellar evolution. Also toss in the small area of the galaxy visable to the unaded eye and you get a very small statistical sample size.
I have read sci-fi senarios that had a chain reaction of supernovae blowing up a chunk of the galaxy. Stars are not like kegs of gunpowder or uranium atoms and as far as I understand it there is nothing externaly that could touch one off. They really only go off when they are darn good and ready to.