When novae change...

I saw a paper on arXiv this morning that is quite interesting: it reports the discovery of an eclipsing dwarf nova which is embedded in a nebula. The interesting thing is that this nebula is considered to be a remnant from an old nova explosion (483 CE in Orion), therefore this dwarf nova was once a nova. The paper is talking about millenia-long transition from high accretion states (nova) to low accretion rates (dwarf nova), but we know that GK Per exhibited a similar behavior in less than a century (it was rather several decades). I am not sure what is responsible for this transition. Here's the link to the paper:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.04212