A 9 Month Hubble Space Telescope Near-UV Survey of M87. I. Light and Color Curves of 94 Novae, and a Redetermination of the Nova Rate

M87 has been monitored with a cadence of 5 days over a span of 9 months through the near-ultraviolet (NUV; F275W) and optical (F606W) filters of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) of the Hubble Space Telescope. This unprecedented dataset yields the NUV and optical light and color curves of 94 M87 novae, characterizing the outburst and decline properties of the largest extragalactic nova dataset in the literature (after M31 and M81). We test and confirm nova modelers’ prediction that recurrent novae cannot erupt more frequently than once every 45 days, show that there are zero rapidly recurring novae in the central ∼1/3 of M87 with recurrence times