Like all novae, it is a binary system, comprising a white dwarf and donor low-mass star in close orbit to the point of being only semidetached.

The white dwarf sucks matter off its companion, which has filled its Roche lobe,[3] onto its accretion disk and surface until the excess material is blown off in a thermonuclear event.

[3] First seen by Zygmunt Laskowski, a medical professor and amateur astronomer,[5] and then confirmed on the night of 8 June 1918 by the UK amateur astronomer Grace Cook,[6] Nova Aquilae reached a peak magnitude of −0.5; it was the brightest nova recorded in the era of the telescope.

The nova's parallax, 3.191±0.069 milliarcseconds, was measured by the Gaia spacecraft which implies a distance of 1020±23 light years.

[2] Spectroscopic analysis conducted by Arenas and colleagues indicated the system consisted of a white dwarf of about 1.2 times as massive as the sun, with an accretion disk, and a companion star with about 20% of the Sun's mass.