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Mystery object blotted out a giant star for 200 days - National Geographic
Jun 16, 2021 1 min, 21 secs

Described in a new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, some of the theories still on the table rely on as-yet unobserved phenomena, such as a dark disk of material orbiting a nearby black hole, or undiscovered, dust-enshrouded companion stars.

But over 17 years of observations, the star has only gone dark once, in 2012, making it more difficult for teams to nail down a plausible culprit.

“It'll be cool to see more observations of this star, of whatever caused this, and to piece together how something like this happened.”.

“It’s unusual for a star to dim in brightness by this much and for this long, and it immediately caught my eye as something unusual,” says study author Leigh Smith, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge.

During the first half of 2012, the star almost completely disappeared, losing 97 percent of its brightness.

“That’s very hard to understand,” says Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, who wasn’t involved in the observations.

“It’s something bigger than the star that’s completely opaque, and there aren’t many things that do that.”.

And if that’s true, the authors say, perhaps the best explanation involves a huge, dusty debris disk swirling around an orbiting companion star.

The team considered a handful of possibilities, including main sequence stars and dense stellar corpses such as white dwarfs, but the disks that normally form around those stars don’t fully explain the observations.

It’s also possible that the obscuring dust is being stripped from the star by an orbiting companion, but that wouldn’t fully explain the observations.

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